Fotografi a Yvoire

Yvoire is small enough to walk end to end in ten minutes, which is exactly why it photographs well: everything is one frame from everything else. The village was fortified in 1306 by Amédée V of Savoy and still has its walls and its gates; inside them the lanes are grey stone hung with geraniums and petunias from June to September, and those flowers are the reason Yvoire sits on the Plus Beaux Villages de France list and keeps winning the flowering prizes. The château on the point is private and closed to visitors, but it is the picture: seen from the fishermen's harbour or the breakwater it rises straight out of the water with the Swiss shore behind it. Beside it, the Jardin des Cinq Sens was laid out in the 1980s inside the château's old kitchen garden — hornbeam walls, a cloister plan, rooms for touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. It is ticketed and seasonal, roughly mid-April to early October, so check the dates before you build a session around it. The harbour is the other half of the day. The Lake Geneva company's Belle Époque fleet calls here in season on the crossings to Nyon and the Swiss shore, and a paddle steamer coming alongside is worth timing a frame for; check the current sailings, because the winter timetable is a different thing entirely. Ten minutes east, Excenevex has the only natural sand beach on Lake Geneva, shallow and backed by pines, at its best late in the afternoon when the light comes down the water. Timing: June or September. In August the lanes are a queue by eleven, and from November to March a large part of the village simply shuts.