Geneva’s Jet d’Eau
Tuesday, 28th February 2006 by Alex Turnbull
At the point where Lake Geneva empties into the Rhone River, you can hardly miss the spectacular Jet d'Eau - a 140 metre jet of water, and officially the world's largest fountain. Two groups of pumps spray an astonishing 500 litres of water per second into the air at 200 km/h - meaning that at any given time there's about 2,000 litres of water in the air! You can see just how huge it is in this view from Cathedrale St. Pierre on Wikipedia
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
I’m glad to finally see the first sight from my homecountry! There is much more to see in Switzerland (unfortunately only little of that is in high-res).
For example, this is the (former) military airport of Duebendorf (where I live) where the Rolling Stones will hold their only concert in Switzerland of their bigger bang tour this summer.
View Placemark
Pretty amazing… but I couldn’t help but think about how in many parts of the world, humans can’t find clean drinking water and here this fountain is spraying 500 liters per second simply for decoration.
Well, life is simply not a fair proposition is it?
Well, I think spraying water that hight will look good and it changes your mood and make you real cool. In the right side of the picture I find some part of land and road are like eaten cheese. Kindly tell me what.
“Pretty amazing… but I couldn’t help but think about how in many parts of the world, humans can’t find clean drinking water and here this fountain is spraying 500 liters per second simply for decoration.”
Well it’s not wasting any water, it’s just reusing the lake water.
“eaten cheese”? can you describe further Mr Murali? – i cant see what you are talking about.
If you follow the Rhone downstream to where it merges with the Avre, there is an amazing effect where the two differently coloured rivers mix. You can sort of see it in the aerial picture: View Placemark but it’s best viewed from the railway bridge just downstream: http://jonathan.rawle.org/gallery/summer2001/jonction
Thank you for your reply,Well It is the trees I saw the trees as depth, sorry. And thank you once again for your reply.
This fountain really is huge! We were cross-country skiing in the Jura mountains today and we saw the Jet d’Eau from at least 30 km away. It is a shame that there is not more high-res in Switzerland, but you can look at the whole country in high-res at http://map.search.ch; the Matterhorn has an awesome shadow. I can’t work out how to make a link to a certain location in search.ch, so you’ll have to find it yourself – it’s just west of the town Zermatt.
The Jet d’Eau is relly amazing. In the night it is very nicely lit up and you can get really close to it. I you are as lucky (and stupid) as we were, the wind changes while you are at the other side of the road and the way is blocked. Walking through half of Geneve back to out hostel with all of our clothes soaked with water was an intersting experience…