Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

Where it sits. Chamonix fills a narrow trench at 1,035 metres along the river Arve, wedged between two mountain ranges that could hardly be less alike. To the south-east the Mont Blanc massif rises in one continuous 3,000-metre step from the valley floor to the summit of Mont Blanc at 4,806 metres, its lower flank hung with the Bossons and Taconnaz glaciers, which reach further down towards inhabited ground than any other ice in the Alps. To the north-west the Aiguilles Rouges present a lower, redder, snow-free wall of gneiss and schist, and because they face the massif squarely they are where everyone goes to photograph it. The commune, formally Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, covers 245 square kilometres and holds around 8,600 permanent residents, strung along the valley in a chain of villages — Les Houches, Les Bossons, Chamonix itself, Les Praz, Argentière and Le Tour.

How a farming valley became the birthplace of alpinism. Two English travellers, William Windham and Richard Pococke, walked up from Geneva in 1741, climbed to the Mer de Glace and published accounts that turned the valley into a destination for the curious. Forty-five years later, on 8 August 1786, the crystal hunter Jacques Balmat and the doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard reached the summit of Mont Blanc, prompted by a standing reward offered by the Geneva scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who made the ascent himself the following year. The statue on the Place Balmat, unveiled in 1887, shows Balmat pointing the summit out to Saussure. After an accident on the mountain killed three porters in 1820, the valley's guides organised themselves into the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix in 1821, the oldest guiding company in the world and still the largest, with several hundred members. In 1924 the town hosted the international winter sports week that the International Olympic Committee later recognised as the first Winter Olympic Games.

On screen. Chamonix has a longer film history than any other Alpine town, because it had both the scenery and the technicians. Premier de cordée (1944, Louis Daquin), adapted from Roger Frison-Roche's novel by a writer who was himself the first outsider admitted to the Compagnie des Guides, was shot on location in the massif under wartime conditions and is still the reference point for French mountain cinema. Marcel Ichac used the newly opened Aiguille du Midi cable car to make Les Étoiles de midi in 1959, filming climbers on ground no camera crew had reached before. The valley's best-known international credit is The World Is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted): the sequence in which Bond and Elektra King are attacked on skis by paraglider-borne snowmobiles and then engulfed by an avalanche was shot in the Chamonix valley in the winter of 1999, standing in for the mountains of Azerbaijan. Second-unit crews have worked here continuously ever since, and the valley remains the default location whenever a production needs a real glacier rather than a digital one.

What you actually see today. The town centre is a compact grid of nineteenth-century hotel architecture around the church square, dense with equipment shops and dominated by the view up to the Aiguille du Midi. Three lift systems define the day. The Aiguille du Midi cable car rises to 3,777 metres in two stages; the Montenvers rack railway, opened in 1908, runs 5.1 kilometres to the balcony above the Mer de Glace; and the Brévent and Flégère lifts climb the opposite side to the classic viewpoints. The ski terrain is divided between separate areas — Grands Montets above Argentière, Brévent-Flégère, Le Tour-Balme, and the family slopes of Les Houches — linked by bus rather than by lift, and the valley's signature descent, the Vallée Blanche, is an off-piste glacier route of some twenty kilometres taken with a guide. Below town, the north portal of the Mont Blanc Tunnel, opened on 19 July 1965 and 11.6 kilometres long, carries freight to Courmayeur; the fire inside it in March 1999 killed 39 people and led to the tunnel's complete rebuilding.

Getting there and timing. Geneva airport is 88 kilometres away, about an hour by road, and shared shuttles run continuously. The metre-gauge Mont Blanc Express, opened in stages from 1901, climbs from Saint-Gervais-le-Fayet to Vallorcine and the Swiss border, stopping at every hamlet in the valley and included free with local visitor cards. Winter runs from late December to mid-April; the high trails clear between mid-June and early July and stay walkable into October. The last week of August belongs to the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, when 10,000 runners and their supporters fill every bed in the valley.