Val d'Isère: the back story

About Val d'Isère: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Val d’Isère was a hard-working farming village at the very head of the Isère valley long before the first skiers arrived in the 1930s. Within a generation it had built its own lifts, its own ski school and a ski club that raised Olympic champions.

A village at the end of the road

Val d’Isère sits at the head of the Tarentaise valley, beneath the Col de l’Iseran, and for centuries it was a place of farmers, cheesemakers and long winters. The hamlet of Le Fornet still shows how hard those winters could be: its first village, lower down, was swept away by an avalanche, and the stone houses you see today were rebuilt further upstream, with beams dated to about 1750.

The birth of a resort

In 1929 a visitor called Jacques Mouflier fell for the valley and became convinced it could be a resort. From 1932 came a post office, electricity, running water, an approach road and the first hotels; Val d’Isère dates its life as a ski resort from 1934, and its first tourist office from 1936. The Col de l’Iseran road opened in 1937, the year the village became a household name in France.

A village that taught itself to ski, then taught France to win.

Learning to ski

In the winter of 1932–33 a handful of guests took lessons from two Austrian instructors, and the young people of the village were quick to learn the snowplough and start teaching it themselves. The Club des Sports was founded in 1935 by Charles Diebold, an Alsatian, and the French ski school, the ESF, began here in the 1936–37 season with about a dozen instructors. The club now calls itself the world’s most decorated ski club.

Lifts to the summits

The Société des Téléphériques de Val d’Isère was founded in 1938 with a bold idea: runs between about 1,850 and 3,300 metres that could be skied end to end without taking the same lift twice. Work began in May 1939, and the Solaise cable car was finished in December 1942. The Fornet cable car followed in 1972, opening the way to the Iseran sector and the Pissaillas glacier.

The champions

Henri Oreiller, who trained alone on these slopes as a boy, became France’s first Olympic ski champion, with downhill and combined gold at the 1948 Games in St. Moritz. Jean-Claude Killy arrived in Val d’Isère aged three and went on to win all three alpine golds at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Christine and Marielle Goitschel, sisters from the village, took the first two places in both the slalom and the giant slalom at Innsbruck in 1964.

Racing on the Face

In 1955 the club started the Critérium de la Première Neige, an early-December race to draw skiers in training, and it is still a fixture of the men’s World Cup, run on the Oreiller-Killy and the Face de Bellevarde. In 1992 the Face de Bellevarde hosted the men’s Olympic downhill, giant slalom, super-G and combined for the Albertville Games, and the 2009 World Championships were held here too.

The village today

Val d’Isère has kept its stone-and-wood village around the church of Saint-Bernard, with the newer quarter of La Daille at the gondola and the old hamlet of Le Fornet up the valley. Linked with Tignes, the area long known as Espace Killy now counts 300 km of marked runs, with the season running from late November into early May.

Our advice: come for the Critérium weekend in mid-December if you love racing, or for the last fortnight in late April, when the passes are cheaper and the terraces are full of sun. Advanced skiers should take the Face de Bellevarde first thing, on freshly groomed snow; beginners should leave it for another day.

Val d’Isère through the years

Dates from Val d’Isère Tourisme’s history and champions pages (read October 2026).

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Val d'Isère: the back story before you go.