Photo : Cjulien21 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Lods
Crossed from one end to the other by the pretty river Loue that gushes out a few kilometres away, the town is a former village of winegrowers and blacksmiths.
The village is set at one of the narrowest points of the Loue valley, sheltered from the unleashing of the elements. It was an important wine centre and the seat of a flourishing metallurgical industry in the eighteenth century, when five hundred workers worked in the forges of the Loue.
Seen from the river, near the old mills, the houses tiered on the hillside fit into one another the better to protect themselves from the rigours of the climate. The lanes climb steeply to the church, whose pyramidal tufa rock springs towards the sky. They are mostly lined with winegrowers' houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with rendered façades resting on cellars opening through large porches. Some of them still show their old limestone-slab roofing, which resisted well the weight of snow and the fiercest winds. The fortified house of the Thoraise family stands on the heights of Lods, a little apart from the town and the church: it is the oldest in the village (fourteenth century).
