Fountain of L'Orgeolet

The path that climbs the hill of Montet and that progressively sinks into the vineyard is also the road that leads to the Bex&Arts Triennial Exhibition. And here, a note is needed to evoke, in a few lines, the saga of Lady Hope and her daughter Elizabeth, two women of the English aristocracy who travelled to Switzerland, almost 200 years ago, and who fell under the spell of the Cité des bains of the time.

It was these two women who created the magnificent estate called Soressex, and in 1835, when Elisabeth Hope became the owner, there were only meadows, vines and a forest of chestnut trees. As they were wealthy, they built a two-storey mansion and below it a large glazed and heated greenhouse, housing orange trees, camellias and other exotic plants.

Elisabeth Hope married her coachman, a certain Louis Billard, of Vaud origin, and the couple, who had no children, adopted a young woman from Yverdon by the name of Laure Correvon. This young woman in turn married Jules de Szylassy, an aristocrat of Hungarian origin who had come to Switzerland to have his eyes treated. Eight children were born of this union. Jules de Szylassy was particularly generous with the commune of Bex, creating a foundation for the benefit of the poor. In the middle of the 20th century, the property was sold to the State of Vaud.

This story is emblematic of the attraction that Bex could exert at this time of development of the thermalism. But the Montet hill also abounds in the raw material of gypsum, whose deposits are intrinsically linked to the deposit of rock salt, another well-known resource in Bex.

Today, the company that exploits the gypsum by transporting it by skips from the top of the hill to the factory on the road to Aigle, belongs to a large Swiss group that is the leader in pre-mixed products based on both plaster and lime-cement.

The hill also contains the largest area of chestnut trees in the commune.