How Was Courmayeur Built

Courmayeur is a small alpine village that has been repeatedly built around, and the layers are easy to read.

The old core

A tight knot of stone houses with heavy slab roofs around the parish church, on the only piece of ground in the valley both flat enough and safe enough from avalanche and rockfall to build on.

Roofs for snow

Traditional building here uses local stone slabs, lose, on very heavy timber, laid at a shallow pitch so snow stays on and insulates rather than sliding off onto the door.

The hamlets

Entrèves, Dolonne, Villair and the others are separate villages absorbed into the commune, each with its own church and its own alignment against the slope.

The resort

Hotels and apartment blocks went up from the 1950s along the valley floor and up the slopes, much of it in a chalet idiom that is not local but has been applied consistently enough to look coherent.

The tunnel infrastructure

The tunnel mouth at Entrèves, its approach viaducts and the ventilation works are a piece of heavy engineering in the middle of alpine scenery, and no attempt has been made to hide it.

Avalanche defences

The slopes above the village and the road carry snow fences, deflection walls and galleries, engineered infrastructure that is invisible to most visitors and is the reason the village can stand where it does.

The Skyway

The 2015 cable car replaced a 1940s installation with three stations, rotating cabins and a summit building at 3,466 metres containing a garden, a restaurant and an exhibition space — ambitious, expensive and genuinely impressive engineering.