2. GTV by Moutain bike - Vassieux-en-Vercors / Saint-Jean-en-Royans (stage 2)

7 points of interest

• 

  Vassieux-en-Vercors

  Vassieux-en-Vercors is a place of resistance, and remains forever marked by history. Vassieux is one of the 5 towns and villages of France named after the Companions of the Liberation by General de Gaulle. The village paid a heavy tribute to the help brought by its inhabitants to the maquis of the Vercors. In fact, while the maquis were waiting for a parachute of provisions and weapons, it was the Nazis who sprang up in gliders and landed in the plain of Vassieux, on July 21, 1944. The massacre that followed sounded the end Of resistance in the Vercors. In the central square, a commemorative plaque (a martyrologist) honors the names of the inhabitants, 76 women, children and men who lost their lives on the 430 inhabitants of the village. The Memorial of the Resistance invites us to reflection and to remember. But Vassieux also retains the traces of an earlier history: that of prehistoric men, using an important deposit of flint, evoked by the Museum of Prehistory.

• 

  Vassieux church

  The church of Vassieux-en-Vercors was not spared during the bombing raids of World War II, and the bell tower is all that remains of the old building. The new church adjoining the bell tower (the only preserved edifice) was designed by the architect Pierre Myassard. The choir was reoriented to the west during the rebuilding work, and the decorative style was executed by the painters Aujame, Humblot and Borgès, the Grenoble glassmaker Montfallet and the sculptor Emile Gilioli. The painting of the choir was replaced by an altarpiece by the artist Carmelo Zagari; two stained-glass windows and the altar were designed by Jean-Marc-Cérino. The altar, which is made from Tavel stone, houses the relics of Edith Stein, a German Jew who became a Carmelite and died while being deported to Auschwitz in 1942.

• 

  Departmental Museum of the Resistance

  The museum, which was founded by an old member of the Resistance, was renovated in its entirety in 2010. The museum tour is dotted with rich collections, connecting the revived history of the maquis and the rebuilding with the first-hand accounts of its founder. The tour is interspersed with a lavish collection of objects from the period and tactile terminals, and is structured around three themes: The Vercors before the Vercors, which presents the local and international context from 1918 to 1942; The Vercors Maquis, which contextualises the history of the Maquis from late 1942 to August 1944; and The Vercors after the Vercors, which details the post-war period, the reconstruction of the Vercors, commemorations and memorial buildings.

• 

  Plateau of Vassieux

  The plateau of Vassieux-en-Vercors is an open landscape characteristic of the karstic plateaus, the surface water is almost non-existent and the soils are not thick. However, dolines, which are depressions where the clay accumulates, thus allowing the cultivation of cereals, alongside these dolines, the stones are heaped up.The ruins of two old windmills are visible in the hamlet of La Mure.

• 

  Flint Workshop

  The southern part of the plateau of Vassieux is a flint-sized zone. The flint-sized workshop where the Museum of Prehistory was set up was discovered in 1970 by Dr. Michel Malenfant. It is then covered with a stone formed over the centuries by the plowing of the farmers. This is what protected and preserved it intact as abandoned by prehistoric men 4,500 years ago. After stripping and excavation, the workshop turns out to be a large blade production site (nearly 30 cm). It was exploited during three centuries, from 2700 to 2400 before J.C by Neolithic artisans-tailors. Tools of flint in Vassieux were found in the center of Germany and on the island of Ré. Farmers, occasional hunters, artisans and traders, these Neolithic men invented pluriactivity, which is still today a component of the economy of the mountain.

• 

  Forest of Lente

  With its 3000 hectares located between 1100 m and 1600 m of altitude, the forest of Lente is mainly composed of beeches exploited formerly for the coal, as well as softwoods exploited for the construction of mats for the navy. The forest home includes 5 types of ungulates: chamois, roe deer, deer, mouflons and wild boars.

• 

  The wolf

  The Wolf is a large canid with a brown coat, weighing up to 50 kilos. After disappearing from the Vercors late nineteenth, its presence is suspected in 1996, then confirmed in 1998, following the natural expansion of the Italian population. It is the superpower par excellence. Located at the top of the food chain, it does not hesitate to tackle large prey such as wild boars, deer, deer, chamois, mouflons, but also sheep ...