Gruyères

A medieval town on top of an eighty-two-metre hill above the Saane valley and the Lake of Gruyère, and the place that gives Gruyère cheese its name. The municipality covers 28.4 square kilometres, half of it forest and about forty per cent agricultural, of that farmland, a fifth is alpine pasture, which is the arrangement the cheese depends on. Only about five and a half per cent of the ground is built on at all. The town sits in the upper valley of the Saane, in the Fribourg canton.