The French Alps: Two Kinds of Mountain Town

Plan Neige: resorts built from nothing

Unlike the Alpine villages of Austria or Switzerland that grew organically around existing farming or trading communities over centuries, many of France's biggest ski resorts were built from scratch, deliberately and fast, under a postwar policy known as Plan Neige. Planners sited resorts like Les Menuires and Val Thorens directly at altitude, on the model Courchevel had set after the war, above the tree line, chosen purely for reliable snow and ski-in-ski-out access rather than for any existing settlement or scenic tradition — a rational, engineering-first approach to winter tourism that had no equivalent anywhere else in the Alps at the time.

The results are genuinely impressive by one measure and genuinely divisive by another: the interconnected lift systems these purpose-built resorts made possible produced some of the world's largest ski areas, but the architecture — often blocky, functional, mid-century concrete — gives the resorts a starkly modern look that visitors expecting a chocolate-box Alpine village sometimes find jarring. Understanding Plan Neige is the key to not being surprised by it: these towns were never meant to look old, because they aren't.

Chamonix: the older story, and Mont Blanc's shadow

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc sits at the opposite end of that spectrum — a genuine mountaineering town that predates the ski industry entirely, built around the base of Mont Blanc (4,808 m), Western Europe's highest peak, and considered the birthplace of modern mountaineering after the first ascent of the mountain in 1786. That older history gives Chamonix an organically grown town centre, hotels and mountain guiding culture that the purpose-built resorts simply don't have, alongside genuinely serious skiing and mountaineering terrain that draws a different, more experienced crowd than the luxury resorts further south.

The Aiguille du Midi cable car climbs from the town to 3,842 metres in stages, delivering one of the most dramatic panoramic views in the Alps — Mont Blanc's summit visible at close range, and on clear days a genuine sense of the massif's scale that no photograph quite conveys. From the top station, a further cable car crosses into Italy, making it possible to descend the far side of the mountain into a different country entirely, a genuinely unusual border experience by cable car.

Les Trois Vallées: skiing at industrial scale

Les Trois Vallées links Courchevel, Méribel, Val Thorens and several smaller resorts into a single interconnected lift network covering around 600 kilometres of piste — the largest linked ski area in the world, skiable on one pass without ever returning to the same valley twice in a day. This scale is a direct product of the Plan Neige approach: purpose-built resorts sited for lift efficiency rather than historical settlement could be connected in ways that organically grown villages, hemmed in by existing roads and buildings, generally can't match. Courchevel in particular has developed a luxury reputation — high-end hotels, fine dining and a genuinely international, high-spending clientele — that sits alongside the area's serious skiing rather than instead of it.

Annecy: the Alps' turquoise lake town

Annecy, often nicknamed the “Venice of the Alps” for its network of canals threading through a beautifully preserved old town, sits on the shore of Lake Annecy, one of Europe's cleanest large lakes, its water an almost implausible turquoise that owes more to the lake's glacial mineral content than to any filter or exaggeration. The old town's arcaded streets, flower-lined canals and lakeside promenades make it one of the most photogenic stops in the French Alps without requiring any winter-sports interest at all, and its position — close enough to Geneva and Chamonix to combine easily with either — makes it a natural addition to a wider Alpine itinerary rather than a standalone destination.

The Alps in summer: trekking and one of Europe's deepest canyons

The French Alps run a genuine second season once the snow melts. The Tour du Mont Blanc, a roughly 170-kilometre trekking circuit around the Mont Blanc massif passing through France, Italy and Switzerland, is one of Europe's classic long-distance hikes, typically walked over one to two weeks with mountain refuges providing accommodation along the route. Further south, the Gorges du Verdon cuts a canyon considered the deepest in Europe, its turquoise river running between limestone cliffs hundreds of metres high — a landscape for hiking, via ferrata climbing routes, and kayaking or canoeing along the river itself, and a striking contrast to the high-altitude scenery further north in the massif proper.