Lost villages
These places no longer exist. Sometimes a field name, some ruins or a few mentions in the archives are all that remain. Each entry tells what is known about how they disappeared, with its sources.
Buratte
A vanished medieval village, mentioned in 1314 and abandoned in the Middle Ages. Its chapel survived until 1832 and its name now designates a neighbourhood of Bure.
JU · Lost villageCourtemblin et Courtari
During the Thirty Years' War the troops of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar destroyed Courtemblin, which never rose again. Today only street names recall the two villages.
JU · Lost villageLa Pran
Archaeological site of a vanished Merovingian hamlet of farmers and smiths along the Pran stream, in the municipalities of Develier and Courtételle.
JU · Lost villagePlaney
Lost village of the Franches-Montagnes on which Saint-Brais depended in 1275. It is said to have been burned by French soldiers in 1637.
GE · Lost villageCusy et Villars
Around 1100 Hermance was just a castrum of fishermen's huts within the parish of Villars. The founding of the borough in 1247 brought the decline of Villars and neighbouring Cusy.
GE · Lost villageFaubourgs de Saint-Léger et Saint-Victor
To deny the duke of Savoy a foothold in case of siege, Genève razed its suburbs of Saint-Victor and Saint-Léger, outside its walls, from 1531 onwards.
GE · Lost villageVuillonnex
Lost locality in the municipality of Bernex, seat of a deanery of the diocese of Genève around its church of Saint-Mathieu, destroyed in the 17th century.
VS · Site · Lost villageArbignon
Already inhabited in Roman times, Arbignon, on the right bank of the Rhône, was probably abandoned because of the Aboyeu floods, and Collonges took its place.
VS · Lost villageChièzes
A vanished village of the municipality of Troistorrents, Chièzes gave its name to a lordship of the Abbey of Saint-Maurice from at least 1258 until 1798.
VS · Lost villageOberhäusern
Oberhäusern, once the main place of what is now the municipality of Eischoll, was still inhabited around 1900. Its community house of 1656 fell into ruin in the 1920s.
VS · Lost villageOttanel
First parish centre of the whole Salvan and Finhaut valley, the hamlet of Ottanel vanished under a landslide in 1535, on the territory of today's municipality of Vernayaz.
VS · Lost villageRichelsmatt
A medieval hamlet with its own jurisdiction, Richelsmatt, near Steinhaus, declined after the plague of 1629 and was deserted around 1830.
VS · Lost villageRied
Ried, a hamlet in the municipality of Blatten where the first hotel of the Lötschental was built in 1868, was completely destroyed by the landslide of 28 May 2025.