Les Vaux de Cernay

The Vaux de Cernay are a protected site of the Yvelines, spread over the communes of Auffargis, Cernay-la-Ville and Senlisse, in the Haute Vallée de Chevreuse Regional Nature Park. It is a narrow valley, partly marshy, strewn with sandstone blocks and bordered by wooded slopes. The ru des Vaux forms small waterfalls there called the "bouillons de Cernay". This stream, developed in the seventeenth century to supply the waters of the Versailles park, flows into the Yvette at Dampierre.

In the late nineteenth century, open-air painters settled there and formed the Cernay school, led by Léon Germain Pelouse. The site is explored over about five kilometres, among ponds and the ruins of the Cistercian abbey founded in 1118, dissolved in 1791. Marked paths and a variant of the GR 1 cross the woods. The wetlands, meadows and reedbeds shelter protected plant species. The abbey, bought back by the Rothschilds in 1873, is now a hotel.

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