Photo spot in Yvoire & the French shore of Lake Geneva
Le Jardin des Cinq Sens
A walled garden laid out in the château's old kitchen plot as a cloister of hornbeam rooms — touch, taste, smell, sight and sound.
About Le Jardin des Cinq Sens
Get directionsThe Jardin des Cinq Sens was created in the 1980s inside the château's former kitchen garden and is designed as a medieval cloister: hornbeam walls clipped into green rooms, each planted for one of the senses, arranged around a central water garden. For a photographer that means something rare — a series of enclosed outdoor sets, each about the size of a small room, with clean green walls and no background clutter at all.
Use the hedge walls as a backdrop and the arched openings between rooms as frames. The planting is dense and low, so a subject reads clearly against it; the aviary and the water at the centre add movement when a frame needs it. Because everything is enclosed, this is the one place in Yvoire where a strong midday sun can be worked around — move into the shaded side of a room and the hedge does the diffusing.
It is a ticketed garden with a season, roughly mid-April to early October, and it has its own rules about photography. Check the current opening dates and ask permission before you plan a session here rather than arriving with a couple and a plan.
The garden is small and can fill up in the middle of a summer day. First hour after opening is the version worth having.
Best time to shoot
First hour after opening, roughly mid-April to early October
Tips
Ticketed and seasonal with its own photography rules — check the opening dates and ask permission ahead. The clipped hedge rooms give clean green backdrops even at midday.
Other spots in Yvoire & the French shore of Lake Geneva
The medieval gates and the flowered lanes
Grey stone lanes inside a fourteenth-century wall, hung with geraniums and petunias from June to September — the reason Yvoire wins its flowering prizes.
The harbour, the breakwater and the château
The fourteenth-century château standing straight out of the water above the fishermen's harbour, with the Swiss shore as a pale line behind it.
Excenevex beach
The only natural sand beach on Lake Geneva — a shallow shelving crescent backed by pines, ten minutes east of Yvoire.
Ready to book?
Our concierge team will hand-pick 2-3 photographers who know Le Jardin des Cinq Sens — free of charge.