How Was Cogne Built

Cogne is built along one edge of a meadow, and the meadow is why it has never sprawled.

Stone and timber

Houses here are stone below and timber above, under heavy slab roofs laid to hold snow. The pattern is standard across the western Alps and is unusually well preserved in the hamlets around the village.

The hamlets

Lillaz, Gimillan, Epinel and Cretaz are separate settlements with their own chapels, strung along the valley and up the slopes, each sited above the avalanche paths.

The meadow rule

The Prato di Sant'Orso has never been built on, which is a deliberate and long-standing choice: it is common grazing, it is the view, and keeping it empty is the single best planning decision the village ever made.

The mining works

The Colonna complex at 2,400 metres, the cableways down to the valley and the tunnel railway driven kilometres through the mountain are industrial archaeology at high altitude, and the tunnel is now the way visitors get in.

The park buildings

The old royal hunting lodges and the guard posts built for the reserve are scattered through the valleys and several are now refuges or park stations.

Chapels everywhere

Each hamlet has its own chapel, several of them frescoed, and the density of them in a commune of fourteen hundred people is a measure of how separately those hamlets once lived.

Modern building

Post-war growth has been modest and mostly in a local idiom, partly because the park restricts it and partly because there is nowhere to put it.