The French Are Fighting Over Ski HeavenBefore It Melts
“Progress spells death to the ancient village of Tignes high up in the Alps,” crackles the plummy received pronunciation of a British Pathé news report in 1952, cheerily titled ‘Last Days of the Doomed Village.‘
“From their ancient homes, the 430 inhabitants have been ordered to move, and they protest. For countless generations, their families have lived here, now their valley is to be flooded to provide for a huge dam to power France.”
Unlike many others in the Alps, Tignes existed long before the French government’s great “Snow Plan” project, which saw future-facing resorts built across the mountains between 1964 and 1977. Tignes was a settlement scattered along the banks of the Isère River in a basin-like valley, about 1,700 meters above sea level. When civil engineers realized they could harness the narrow gorge of Val d’Isère to swell the river up into a great lake–and produce a tenth of the power an energy-hungry post-war nation needed–few obstacles could stand in their way.
That didn’t stop the people of Tignes from trying.
They refused EDF’s compensation offers, instead resorting to sabotage and lying in front of bulldozers that came to raze their ancient village. When the dam was eventually finished and the floodgates opened on March 15, 1952, many simply locked their doors. On the second day, the telephone wires were cut. On the third, 300 police officers arrived to haul the villagers out and away from water rising one meter a day as it lapped at their steps.
“Even the dead have to move,” the British Pathé report continues, showing graves soon to be exhumed and moved up the mountain to Boisses, on a plateau at the western end of the dam.
Save for the church, school, and city hall–also taken up–all the buildings were dynamited so Tigners could not return and risk meeting a watery end.
Once the exodus was complete, every 10 years, the villages would have a painful reminder of what they’d lost when the mighty Lac de Chevril was drained so the dam could be inspected.
“Just long enough to re-open our wounds,” José Reymond writes in Tignes, Mon Village Englouti.
Perhaps too hurt to stay or simply unwilling to move higher up a mountain, only 15 of 87 families stuck around and took the chance to have first dibs on land around the natural Lac de Tignes as plans to build a resort began. Seventy years on, with two-bed chalets selling for north of €2million in a resort that has become one of the world’s most famous, their descendants may feel the family had failed to seize a Bitcoin moment.
During a visit to Tignes earlier this year, it was clear that the tension over land and property at the heart of the resort’s rebirth remains in the air, albeit in a different form.
raeva/iStock
For a week, I was lucky enough to stay in a grand all-inclusive hotel that had just opened on the site of a huge car park, in pride of place next to the winding network of lifts that take skiers across the Tarentaise Valley to Val d’Isère. It would replace most of the spaces used by day-tripping locals with 430 rooms, starting rates at €6,050 for seven nights for a double. In a village of 2,000 fixed residents, that’s a significant population addition. Even more so now, once again, the people of Tignes are moving higher up. But this time around, it is not because of a grand energy project–but because of the result of many others.
“As the impact of global warming and climate change on the mountain scene has gained a higher profile, we thought it timely to present the case for a base at altitude and look at why the right property may be a rewarding investment,” says John D. Wood, a high-end real estate agent. The luxury property seller sells homes like the €9 million four-bed chalet in Tarentaise, along with the idea that as climate change heats things up, savvy property investors should go in the same direction.
“It offers a passive income, with long-term capital growth, while providing an all-year-round indulgence from winter sports,” Wood explains, noting the potential in the French Alps, thanks to a “limited supply of chalets, as many resorts have strict building restrictions in place”.
The equation is fairly simple. Combine sluggish building rates with a 5.6% reduction per decade in snow cover duration that pushes viable skiing higher and cuts the low altitude season on south-facing slopes to far less than the traditional November to April stretch, then chuck in a hunger for the Alpine pistes that the pandemic failed to dampen long-term, and the result will be higher property prices.
It is naïve to think that the world of alpine skiing has ever been free of the monied classes and their desire for exclusive property, but something about my experience on the slopes this year sat far less easily than my last trip 10 years before.
I felt this unease most profoundly when our small group slid above the crest of a hill and looked down upon the famous La Folie Douce, a bar-come-restaurant that is a sight to behold. On its crooked roof, a revolving cast of leotard-wearing singers, saxophonists, and Mad Hatter-inspired dancers seemingly straight out of an SSX Tricky cut scene stands above a writhing pit of sloshed skiers, hyping them into a frenzy. The sound of the cacophony booms across the valley, apparently acting as a siren call to half of Europe’s boarding school population to come and drop €20 on a spritz.
The seasonal La Folie Douce acts as a sign that the skiing months have returned for the year and that the good times are still here. Several sodden receipts, discarded on the Champagne-soaked floor and stretching north of €10,000, suggest its clientele are very much feeling them. Once a backdrop of a rapidly melting mountain is considered, their actions might be interpreted less as harmless debauchery than end days of Rome, la folie aigre, or, as a University of Staffordshire academic recently witnessed at the melting Stubai Glacier, “last chance tourism”.
The figures are generally stark. European Alp glaciers will lose 94% of their volume if we hit the predicted 2.7C of global warming by 2100, with 70% of total snow cover gone. Not only will this destroy the area’s main source of income, but water supplies will be disrupted and villages imperiled as dammed lakes like Chevril become overloaded. Glacial melt is a classic global warming doom loop, as the loss of ultra-reflective landmass intensifies the heating impact of the sun.
Already smaller, lower-altitude resorts are going bust. A terribly warm winter in 2022 after the pandemic saw Le Mont-Dore in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Céüze in the Hautes-Alpes, and Schnepfenried in Alsace go under.
Real estate agents like Nicolas Chatillon know this, with the Tignes-child-turned-Paris-financier pronouncing “the mass market is finished. Upscaling is a trend. People want to spend more.” Perhaps realizing shorter seasons and less space means only the bigger spenders can compete; his firm has bought up 70% of the hotels in Tignes and done them up into four and five-star outlets. One is a former bowling alley, another pitched as “more exclusive than La Folie Douce”.
Those running the resorts are also reacting to their threatened future. In 2018, a cable car with “the world’s largest cable car roof terrace” opened in Tignes, taking people from the top of a funicular railway bored into the mountain up 500m to near the peak of the Grand Motte glacier. It was part of a €17m investment designed to offer year-round skiing to all those who came to Tignes.
When I went, I was bowled over by the engineering of the cable car and the vast cogs that winch it. For a moment, as I skied from the peak down this vast icy bowl, Mont Blanc pressed against the clear blue sky, I felt like I was in a Pink Floyd video.
The glacier made the area famous with the slogan “Ski in Tignes 365 days a year”. Sadly, that slogan now feels like the ski resort equivalent of “There’s no way it will rain on my wedding day” or “I’m sure the French government won’t really flood my village.” By almost all models, the Grand Motte will vanish entirely this century–maybe even by 2070.
Dani Ber/Shutterstock
In 2019, just a year after the cable car opened, the glacier was closed to skiers for the first time. “Between the heat and the episodes of heatwave, we have no more snow to work. Cracks are formed, and it has become dangerous,” Tignes Resort announced in a statement. The ironic parallels between the cable car and a hydroelectric dam immediately mothballed upon completion in favor of nuclear power are hard to miss.
Today, Grand Motte has melted so much that a new lake has been created lower down, at an altitude of 2,810 meters. This lake could eventually overflow and spill into the Tignes Valley. If it did, few but those highest up the mountains would survive it.
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