Écouché-les-Vallées
municipality in France

Écouché-les-Vallées (French pronunciation: [ekuʃe le vale]) is a commune in the department of Orne, northwestern France. The municipality was established on 1 January 2016 by merger of the former communes of Batilly, La Courbe, Écouché (the seat), Loucé, Saint-Ouen-sur-Maire and Serans. On 1 January 2018, the former commune of Fontenai-sur-Orne was merged into Écouché-les-Vallées. Its seat, Écouché, is classed as a Petite Cité de Caractère.
Geography
The commune is made up of the following collection of villages and hamlets: La Courbe, Mesnil-Glaise, Le Haut du Château, Batilly, Treize Saints, L'Être Hubert, Saint-Ouen-sur-Maire, Serans, Écouché, Méheudin, Loucé, Noiseville, Le Hamel and Fontenai-sur-Orne.
The parts of the commune that contains Batilly and La Courbe is part of the area known as Suisse Normande.
Parts of the commune make up the area, the Plaine d'Argentan, which is known for its cereal growing fileds and horse stud farms.
Écouché-les-Vallées along with another 65 communes is part of a 20,593 hectare, Natura 2000 conservation area, called the Haute vallée de l'Orne et affluents.
The Commune has 5 rivers running through it with another 6 streams. The five rivers are the Orne, Maire, Baize, Cance and Udon.
“Écouché-les-Vallées” enters the record as municipality in France. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Écouché-les-Vallées, municipality and France can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Écouché-les-Vallées” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.