Pierres du Niton

About this audio guide

This guide to the Pierres du Niton in Geneva follows a granite boulder in the lake that engineer Guillaume Henri Dufour climbed in eighteen twenty to settle a dispute between two cantons, fixing a small bronze mark that later became Switzerland's official elevation reference. Decades on, a geodesist revisited Dufour's figures with better survey data. The guide also digs into Bronze Age axes found at the rock's base in sixteen sixty and the disputed origin of its name, maybe Neptune, maybe an Egyptian goddess. Look for the bronze mark still bolted to the granite above the waterline.