Memorials & tributes
Place de l’Eurovision
- Type
- Historic site / Square
- Address
- Quai du Débarcadère, 1820 Montreux
On 6 June 1954, it was from Montreux that the very first broadcast of the Eurovision network went out, created by the European Broadcasting Union. The programme opened with the penultimate edition of the Narcissus Festival, the 23rd, whose parade that day brought together some twenty flower-covered floats, Vaudois dragoons in 1800-style uniform on horseback, yodellers and a dozen brass bands; the Narcissus Queen rode a float drawn by a swan, her train studded with flowers. Filmed in colour by the Lausanne newsreel company Ciné Actualités but broadcast without sound, the footage was followed by a ninety-minute tour of the Vatican filmed by RAI, then an address by Pope Pius XII on the promises and dangers of television. Around four million viewers, in eight countries, watched the broadcast. The square, until then called Place de la Rouvenaz and then Place du Débarcadère, was renamed Place de l’Eurovision on 6 June 2004, exactly fifty years to the day after that founding broadcast. The name is misleading: it does not refer to the Eurovision Song Contest, but to the birth of the broadcasting network itself, of which Montreux was the starting point. Today people cross it without a thought, two hundred metres south of the station. A hundred and fifty metres further south along the quay stand the covered market and the statue of Freddie Mercury.