Notre Dame de Lourdes Chapel

This small chapel, isolated in the Mouilles hamlet, was built in 1871 by the reverend priest Joseph Marie Delavay, to ask to the Virgin of the Mouilles to protect and cure his brother from the plague, the priest Jean-Marie Delavay.

Jean-Marie Delavay was born in 1834 in the Chôt hamlet in Les Gets. He was a priest and a famous botanist. After getting in the Missions Étrangères in Paris, he was envoy for a mission in china in 1867. He's been three times in this faraway country and he used much of his time for his botanical searches. It's on this asian territory, precisely in the Yunnan region, that he discovered an uncountable number of plants. Despite the communications difficulties between the both countries, he sent his finds at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, where we count over 200 000 plants that the priest identified. It's in 1895 that he died in his Yunnan's mountains.