Cirque du Fer-à-Cheval

The Cirque du Fer-à-Cheval near Sixt is one of the largest rock amphitheatres in the Alps: a horseshoe-shaped valley head over whose roughly 500 to 700 m high limestone walls dozens of waterfalls plunge in early summer. The area is part of a nature reserve with easy trails on the valley floor.

Highlights

• Horseshoe-shaped valley head
• Dozens of waterfalls in early summer
• Limestone walls up to 700 m high
• Easy trails on the valley floor

Good to know

Practical info

Background & History

The Cirque du Fer-à-Cheval, the “horseshoe”, lies at the head of the Giffre valley in the Haute-Savoie Alps and is regarded as one of the most impressive rock cirques in the entire alpine region. In a wide semicircle enormous limestone walls tower up, over which in early summer, when the high-lying snowfields melt, numerous waterfalls plunge into the depths at the same time. This magnificent natural spectacle came into being through the work of ice-age glaciers, which gouged out the valley and left behind the typical trough shape with its vertical, almost amphitheatre-like walls.

The nearby village of Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval goes back to an abbey founded in the 12th century, whose monks opened up, cultivated and shaped the once remote high-valley region over the centuries. The entire surroundings are today under special protection as a nature reserve and preserve a diverse mountain flora as well as rare animal species such as the golden eagle. The cirque attracted travellers and naturalists as early as the 19th century, who described the enormous rock amphitheatre in astonishment. Anyone hiking through the valley today experiences a barely touched high-mountain landscape in which the power of water and the traces of monastic settlement remain equally clearly palpable and the enormous rock cirque with its plunging waterfalls makes people appear very small.