Things to do
5-
Basilique de Valere
A fortified church on the higher of the town's two hills, walled like a castle because it was one, holding an organ of about 1435 that is the oldest in the world still played. Concerts run through the summer and the climb takes twenty minutes.
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Bisse de Clavau
An irrigation channel of 1453 cut along the cliff above the Rhone east of the town, with a path beside it running through the steepest vineyards in the canton to Saint-Leonard. The bisses are how the dry side of the Valais was farmed and about two hundred kilometres of them still run.
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Chateau de Tourbillon
The bishops' castle on the second hill, built at the end of the thirteenth century and burnt in 1788, left as a ruin with its curtain wall and chapel frescoes standing. It is a steeper climb than Valere and the reward is the two hills seen against each other.
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Lac Souterrain de Saint-Leonard
The largest navigable underground lake in Europe, three hundred metres long in a cavern of gypsum and marble, crossed by rowing boat with a guide. It was drained by an earthquake in 1946 and refilled. Ten minutes east of the town.
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Musee d'histoire du Valais
Inside the castle of Valere on its hill above Sion, the canton's history museum runs from the first hunters to the present across more than a thousand objects. Its centrepiece is the hall of carved neolithic stelae from the Petit-Chasseur burial site. The climb from the old town takes about twenty minutes, and the basilica stands beside it.
