French mountain resorts welcome an average of 10 million tourists in winter according to the France Montagnes website. Vacationers in search of white gold since seven million of them come to practice board sports. But which sites offer the best snow cover, thus guaranteeing good hours of descent?
Vast subject tackled by Geo magazine. Based on the average cumulative snow depth between 2012 and 2020, it has ranked the most snow-covered resorts in France among the more than 350 resorts in the five major French mountain ranges.
Savoie pulls out of the game
Quite logically, the major resorts of the northern Alps, Savoie and Haute-Savoie, take the lion’s share. Seven Savoyard resorts feature in this Top 10, such as Avoriaz, Val Thorens and Tignes, which comes in first place, with nearly 7 meters of snow on average each season. Still in Savoie, a resort less known to the general public, Bonneval-sur-Arc, is rising to a good place. Flaine, built from scratch in a circus, whose premises regularly evoke the microclimate, closes this list.
The Pyrenees don’t have to be ashamed of their snow cover either, with two very well-placed resorts. On the other hand, the Massif Central, the Vosges and the Jura, mountains of lower altitude, are totally absent. Here is the ranking in images and the associated snow depths for each of these resorts.
Flaine (Haute Savoie) – 4.8m
Avoriaz (Haute-Savoie) – 5.1m
La Rosière (Savoie) – 5.24 m
La plagne (Savoie) – 5.24m
Bonneval-sur-Arc (Savoie) – 5.29 m
Val d’Isere (Savoie) – 5.34 m
Val Thorens (Savoie) – 6.27m
Piau-Engaly (Pyrenees) – 6.28m
Cauterets (Pyrenees) – 6.88m
Tignes (Savoy) – 6.97m
Ten stations, which like all the other sliding sites in France, await skiers impatiently, after a blank year last season.