Bourg-Saint-Maurice
"Everyone passes through here on the way to somewhere else, which is exactly why I decided to stop."
The Tarentaise valley town that does the unglamorous work of getting everyone up to Les Arcs, and that quietly hosted an Olympic bobsled track most of its own skiers never bother to visit.
Bourg-Saint-Maurice has a strange relationship with fame. Every year, tens of thousands of skiers pass through it — off the overnight train from Paris, or the motorway from Geneva — on their way up to Les Arcs, which sits nearly a thousand metres above the valley floor and is reached from here by a funicular carved straight through the mountain. Almost none of them stop for more than the time it takes to load luggage onto a bus or a train. Lia and I did the opposite on purpose one February: we based ourselves in the valley town itself for two nights before heading up, mostly out of curiosity about what everyone else was skipping.
The town at the bottom of the funicular
What we found was a proper, functioning Tarentaise valley town, not a resort — a Friday market selling Beaufort cheese and Savoie wine to actual locals, a 19th-century church, streets that don’t stop existing the moment the tourists leave. The funicular itself, when we finally rode it up to Les Arcs, was worth the stop on its own: it climbs nearly 1,200 metres through solid rock in about seven minutes, arriving at an altitude and a view that would otherwise take a long, switchbacked drive. Watching the tunnel walls blur past, I understood why this valley town, unglamorous as it looks from the train platform, is the genuine gateway to one of the biggest ski areas in France.
An Olympic track nobody mentions
The detail that surprised me most, though, was a few kilometres above the town at La Plagne — technically a different resort, but reached easily from Bourg-Saint-Maurice, which served as a key support town for the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics held across this whole region. The Olympic bobsled, luge, and skeleton track built for those Games is still there, still operating, and still one of the very few places in the world where an ordinary tourist can strap into a bobsled and be driven down an actual Olympic run by a professional pilot. I did it. It lasts under a minute and I have never in my life experienced deceleration and terror in such close sequence. Lia, watching from the sidelines with the video camera, still brings it up whenever she wants to embarrass me at dinner parties.
Back in the valley town that evening, sore-necked and grinning, I finally appreciated Bourg-Saint-Maurice for what it actually is: not a detour before the real destination, but the hinge the whole Tarentaise valley turns on — trains, cable cars, Olympic legacy, and a Friday cheese market, all within walking distance of each other.
When to go: December through April for snow access to Les Arcs and the bobsled experience, which typically runs through the winter season. The valley town itself is pleasant in summer too, when it becomes a base for hiking and cycling rather than skiing, with the funicular still running up to Les Arcs’ higher trails.
Keep exploring
More of French Alps