If you are looking at lakes and ponds for sale in Rhône, you are hunting for a rare stretch of water in a small department, heavily built up around Lyon and hilly everywhere else. Private ponds are found mostly in the west: in the green Beaujolais (Beaujolais vert), from the upper Azergues valley to the Thizy area, and in the Monts du Lyonnais, where farm reservoirs and small fishing ponds sit in the hollows of valleys. Along the Saône and east of the city, they tend to be flooded former gravel pits. Sales are very few, and most involve a house or farm with a pond rather than a lake on its own. The listings on this page, from private sellers, estate agents and notaires, add to our national selection of lakes and ponds on the market.
The price section below gives a regional and national order of magnitude, to be read with care given how rare local sales are. The pointers that follow cover what gives a pond its value in Rhône: the water source, trout rivers and protected wetlands, planning rules and the state of the dam. For an overview, read our guide to everything worth knowing before buying a pond.
According to the ma-propriete.fr pond price observatory, which keeps only ponds, lakes and pools sold without buildings in the French DVF land registry data, only 4 pond sales were recorded in Rhône between July 2020 and December 2025: too few to publish a departmental price. In Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 123 ponds sold over the same period at a median of €15,847/ha, and the regional median reached €19,818/ha in 2025† across 16 sales; the national median was €25,235/ha in 2025.
| Indicator | Rhône (69) | Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes | France |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median price 2020-2025 | not published | €15,847/ha | €25,694/ha |
| Average price 2020-2025 | not published | €23,834/ha | €32,291/ha |
| Number of sales 2020-2025 | 4 | 123 | 2,053 |
| Median price 2025 | not published (1 sale) | €19,818/ha† | €25,235/ha |
| Number of sales 2025 | 1 | 16 | 300 |
These figures divide the sale price by the total area of the property, banks and surrounding woodland included: a small, well-equipped pond always comes out dearer per hectare than a large lake surrounded by rough ground. They describe ponds sold on their own; once a house or a sizeable wood is added, the price is built differently.
On the listings side, 26 properties with a pond are offered on ma-propriete.fr across France as of 2 October 2026, 2 of them in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Their median asking price is €94,000 for a median size of about 2.6 ha. These are asking prices for complete properties: they describe the supply on offer more than the average price of a wooded hectare. To work out the full cost of a purchase, add the conveyancing fees with our notary fee calculator.
Source: DVF (French tax authority), processed by ma-propriete.fr; ponds, lakes and pools without buildings of at least 2,000 m², with water covering at least half of the property; July 2020 to December 2025. Listings recorded on 2 October 2026.
Rhône has no pond country to compare with the Dombes, just across the Saône. Its private ponds are one-off creations: a fishing pond dug at the bottom of a meadow in the Haut-Beaujolais, a watering or irrigation reservoir in the Monts du Lyonnais, a dairy-farming area, an enlarged pond by a farm in the Pierres Dorées. Local authorities, for their part, created large leisure lakes: Lac des Sapins, a reservoir from the last quarter of the 20th century between Cublize and Ronno, known for its natural (biological) bathing area, or the Colombier lake at Anse, near where the Azergues meets the Saône.
East of Lyon, the Grand Parc de Miribel-Jonage brings together former gravel pits on the Rhône plain, now the conurbation’s back-up drinking water supply, a flood management area and a leisure park. Outside these public spaces, flooded former quarries occasionally sell as carp fishing lakes, but they remain rare.
Demand comes first from Lyon and its suburbs: families wanting a country house with a pond within reasonable reach of the city, anglers seeking a private fishing pond so as not to depend on public waters, horse owners who value a water reserve for their paddocks. Competition is real for properties with buildings close to the city. In the green Beaujolais, further out, properties are more rural and plots often larger.
If the local supply seems too thin, the Dombes, just to the north-east, remains the region’s great pond market: see the ponds for sale in Ain.
First, establish the administrative position: a pond created on a stream, by diversion or fed by a spring that joins a watercourse must hold a declaration receipt or a permit under water law. The rivers of the Monts du Lyonnais, such as the Brévenne, the Coise, the Yzeron and the Garon, are first-category waters holding brown trout: a pond dammed on one of their tributaries warms the water in summer and may be subject to orders to bring it into line with ecological continuity rules.
Also check the fishing regime, closed water or not, any mapped wetlands around the pond and, near Lyon, the local planning rules: in natural or farming zones, a fishing hut or a house extension may be refused.
Valley ponds in the Beaujolais and the Monts du Lyonnais are often old and simply built: an earth dam, a pipe or outlet structure, an overflow. Have the watertightness checked, make sure there are no trees on the dam, whose roots open leaks, and test the drain-down system. On these granite soils and cultivated slopes, silting is fast: ask when the pond was last drained and dredged, and look at the colour of the water in summer. Finally, in a department where houses are close together, think about the safety of a pond used by children and about neighbours downstream, since a dam failure makes the owner liable. Our article on maintaining a leisure pond sets out the work to plan.
For Rhône, ma-propriete.fr publishes listings from private sellers, agents and notaires: display them by rising price or by size, receive every new one by email through an alert, or put your own property with a pond online. If your project combines water and woodland, see the woods for sale in Rhône, and to widen the search to Ain, Loire or Isère, the full range of ponds and small lakes listed in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
