Neighborhood atmosphere

The Celestines

Some strolls, like those that lead us through the Célestins district, are songs; a few light notes that we thought were meant to pass and that still linger in our minds, like a fading rapture. Their success is to have led you nowhere, except into yourselves, to the doors of your imagination which runs away, caracoles and petarade.

The college

The Celestines

The architect Georges Bonnet designed the Hôtel des Célestins, the emblematic building of Vichy. The year was 1929. Its rounded prow is reminiscent of the bow of the transatlantic liners of the time, and its layout between two streets gives it a little Flatiron look, a New York building known worldwide for its ridge. The Hôtel des Célestins, recognizable by its Art Deco style, became a high school for girls in September 1945, then a college in the 1960s.

Celestine Park

A little further on, you enter the Parc des Célestins, an addition of two parks: the Parc Lardy and the Parc des Célestins. In the middle of the 19th century, a fierce struggle raged between the private owners of Lardy Park and the Compagnie fermière, owner of the Parc des Célestins. The Lardy Park tried to compete with the Compagnie fermière and its springs in the Hall des Sources. Within a “show garden”, animations enchanted the tourists of the time: a bandstand, a game of small horses under the new pavilion of the Lardy spring, a restaurant, a billiard table, a café-concert and a strange theater of human puppets composed of pygmies…

Refreshment stand

Source Lardy

In 1965, the Etablissement des bains de 3e classe closed its doors and gave way, in 2001, to the Lardy Pole University.
The buvette of the spring, today restored in the rules of art, with its carpentry dome that rises to more than 10 m,
no longer has much to do with the griffin fitted out in a Volvic stone basin, in 1848.
The Lardy spring is now highlighted by a mosaic of more than 400,000 pieces, recomposed identically.

I drink Vichy, Vichy Celestins

Source of the Celestines

Many buildings will succeed one another in the nineteenth century to house the source of the Celestines. Among its catchments, remains the Célestins pavilion designed in 1908 by the architect Lucien Woog, in the purest style of the French eighteenth century. The marketing of the time was not displayed on the labels of the Vichy-Célestins but in the evocation of the sacred through this Euville stone conch from which the spring gushes. At the back, a block of aragonite embedded in the building, offers a striking contrast with the sophistication of the glass bell protected by a pink stone balustrade. Probably a desire to sacralize this water with miraculous virtues.

Source des Célestins - Célestins district

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