This winter’s heavy snowfall in the Alps and Pyrenees has given a welcome boost to France’s ski resorts, but it’s only a temporary reprieve as global warming threatens mid and low-altitude sites with closure. To survive, resorts must diversify – a shift that requires not just investment, but a significant cultural change.
France is the world’s leading ski destination after the United States, clocking up around 50 million annual visits to its 249 resorts.
“White gold” is a big economic driver, with the ski industry employing some 120,000 people, both directly and indirectly.
But long-term, skiing is doomed. France’s space agency (CNES) predicts that around half of Europe’s ski resorts will close by 2050 and virtually all by the end of the century, due to global warming.
“We’re heading towards fewer good winters and more poor ones,” says Hugues François, a researcher specialising in mountain tourism and climate change at INRAE in Grenoble.
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Model built in booming ’60s
France’s ski industry developed rapidly from the 1960s, with heavy state support, François explains. Large, purpose-built resorts known as “integrated or third-generation resorts” were built at high altitude, exclusively designed for winter tourism.
Villages at lower altitude developed their own smaller resorts – many of which are now particularly vulnerable to changing snow conditions.
Some 204 ski areas have closed over the last 70 years, according to research from the University of Grenoble, the majority of them situated at below 2,000 metres in altitude.
This is not just as a result of less snow, however. Small communes also struggle to pay for compulsory safety inspections of their ageing ski lifts..
“Many aren’t profitable in themselves,” François argues, “but they sustain the wider tourism economy which in turn supports local services, shops, schools and keeps people living in these areas.”
With the future of skiing tourism melting “you risk a downward spiral – population decline, loss of services, and ultimately a form of rural desertification”, he added.
Half of France’s ski slopes closed by warm weather and rain
Farm not ‘viable’ without skiing
Alpe du Grand Serre, in the northern Alps, is living through that downward spiral. The middle-altitude resort, located in the village of La Morte, was due to close in October 2024 when the community council that manages it deemed it no longer economically viable.
While it reopened for another season, its future is still on the line – a source of anguish for many of La Morte’s 140 residents, who depend on skiiing for a living.
“My father made it very clear: he’d hand over the farm to me on condition that I had something to do in winter,” says sheep farmer and ski instructor Cédric Fraux. “Skiing is essential because it accounts for 70 per cent of my income. Without it, the farm simply isn’t viable.”
Meanwhile local ski shop manager Vincent Lionel says he’s sceptical about depending on low-snow activities.
“All this talk about how ‘snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, ski touring will keep you going’ isn’t the reality,” he says. “We don’t know where we’re headed, that’s the hardest part.”
Listen to a report on Alpe du Grand Serre in the Spotlight on France podcast
Lack of state support
Alpe du Grand Serre has also been slow to diversify, with around 80 percent of its income still linked to snow.
“Perhaps we should have started sooner,” says Florent Battistel, director of the local ski school, which employs around 20 seasonal monitors. “Now it’s time to branch out, and especially into all-season activities.”
But getting up to the lake for a hike or using the slopes for mountain biking in the summer requires ski lifts. And they’re in poor shape.
“Forty years without investing in the resort… not a single ski lift has been replaced,” says Coraline Saurat, president of the community council since 2021. “The infrastructure is ageing, it’s been on life support.”
Since 2017, the council has spent roughly €3.4m “just to keep the resort running, not to invest in its future” she says. The council proposed a €20m private-public redevelopment plan but it had to be abandoned due a big funding gap.
Saurat says there was “no support plan whatsoever” for Alpe du Grand Serre, along with all the other mid-altitude resorts with similar problems. “We’re left to fend for ourselves.”
No uplift in sight for France’s struggling ski resorts
Double blow
The local mayor, Raymond Maslo, recently got the green light to take control of managing the resort. His local council will inherit €80,000 of running costs and €1m of debt, but he believes it’s worth it.
“Leave us to it, we’ll manage,” he says. “Even if it’s only for a decade… at least we’d have saved something.”
Meanwhile, a citizens’ collective, La Morte Vivante, has raised funds and is working on projects to diversify the local economy.
“We have a real opportunity to build the kind of mountain we want to live on,” says co-founder Yohann Echardour.
France’s mountain populations have become emotionally attached to skiing, even if it’s a relatively recent development.
“It’s not that old but it’s a bit of a double blow,” François points out. “What’s being asked now is that the children of the generation who made a major social and economic shift – from a very rural, agricultural economy to one that’s essentially based on tourism – go through a second revolution.
“It’s clearly a model that has brought a significant improvement in quality of life for mountain communities, and given them a sense of identity. So, symbolically as well, it’s very difficult to move away from that model.”
Despite the Herculean task of saving Alpe du Grand Serre’s ski season, sheep farmer turned ski monitor Fraux says he’ll carry on defending the mountain.
“As long as we haven’t reached the summit, we’ll keep climbing, we’ll pull each other up… We still have a bit of hope.”
This article includes interviews by RFI’s Marius Laffont. Listen to an audio report in the Spotlight on France podcast.
