Where are the top 10 Ski Resorts in France?

Like there are horses for courses, the perfect ski resort does rather depend on the activities you’re planning, but here are some pointers:

Best for snowboarders

For minimum crowds and maximum white stuff La Grave is my choice. But this is a resort where no amount of bravado is a substitute for experience. It takes 30 minutes for the cable car to take you up over 3,000 metres. Once you’re there you have 20 kilometres of snowy free-boarding stretching out in front of you, but you can quickly find yourself alone on the glacier and the weather is unpredictable. If you want a serious challenge with a bit more support then consider Chamonix.

Best for beginners

For beginners, skiers or boarders, head somewhere where there’s plenty of short, graded runs closer to the resort. Le Arcs is a bit of a mega-resort but the ski tuition for beginners is great. The Ecole du Ski Français teaches parallel turns right from the start, so no more unwieldy snow-ploughs!

Best for off-piste skiing

Really, there are no challengers to La Grave and Chamonix, although they are both very different types of resort. If you are in a mixed group then choose Chamonix to give the others options. But otherwise, La Grave cannot be beaten for off-piste excitement.

Best to stay a season

Val d’Isere is my choice for après ski. Sure, there are smaller, resorts with more picturesque charm, but Val d’Isere, has all the infrastructure and diversity to please anyone from 5* poseurs to grungy kids.

Best of the rest

• Courchevel for families.
• Serre Chevalier for Gallic character.
• Tignes for all-round appeal and a long season.
• St Martin-de-Belleville for the quiet life, and
• Méribel if you insist on your English breakfasts and pubs.

All popular French ski resorts are cosmopolitan places where it is possible to find people who speak English as a lingua franca. But you will definitely get more out of your time in France if you can speak some of the language. If you learnt a bit of French at school, then consider taking a French language course to brush up before you leave. But if there’s no time for that then of all the countries offering international students high standards in language courses France is one of the best, so you can always take a short course once you’ve arrived, maybe scheduling your lessons for a rest day away from the slopes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 at 1:00 am and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.