"Meylan, La Tronche, Corenc, Montbon ..." a Meylan Travel Page by JLBG

In my Meylan page, I will present mostly Meylan but also neighboring cities of La Tronche, Corenc and Montbonnot-Saint-Martin.

Meylan and Montbonnot-Saint-Martin are now developped at the bottom of the valley though the ancient villages were on the slopes, out of reach of the Isère floods. La Tronche and Corenc have both remained entirely on the slopes of the Chartreuse massif. The Mont Saint Eynard with its fort is on the limit of these communities.

These cities in the neighbourhood of Grenoble have always been residential locations. When a one hour horse or carriage ride was necessary to reach Meylan or La Tronche, wealthy citizens had for summer a country mansion in these remote places. Now that they are reached by bus or car in a dozen of minutes, everybody wants to live there as it is the less polluted part of the valley and has more green spaces. Meylan had 1074 inhabitants in 1946, 19,000 now.
Meylan is twinned since 1986 with Gonzales (Louisiana) in the USA, 1988 with Planegg (Bavaria) in Germany and since 1999 with Didcot in England.

During the past thirty years, Meylan, the first and more recently Montbonnot-Saint-Martin have developed a district called ZIRST (for Zone industrielle de Recherche Scientifique et Technique = Industrial zone for scientific and technical research). That means that the ZIRST has built 2/3 levels buildings ready for rent to small, new companies in electronics, informatics, metrology and other high technology fields. Larger companies have bought land and have now buildings of their own, often developing an interesting architecture. They are the one I will show here.
This ZIRST has often been called the French Silicon Valley. On the 15th of April 2005, the unpronounceable ZIRST has become Inovallée, for Innovation Valley and with an evident wink to Silicon Valley.