Les Gets
"The same slope that terrified me on a mountain bike in July had six-year-olds snowplowing down it in January."
A Portes du Soleil village that spends its winters hosting families on gentle pistes and its summers hosting the fastest downhill mountain bikers on earth, plus a museum entirely dedicated to music boxes.
I went to Les Gets twice in one year without planning it that way, and the two visits could not have been more different. The first was in July, when Lia signed us up to watch a stage of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup and I ended up, against my better judgment, renting a downhill bike myself the day after. The second was in February, back with skis, on pistes that had hosted a completely different kind of adrenaline five months earlier.
The same mountain, twice a year
Les Gets sits at the western edge of the Portes du Soleil, the sprawling lift network that stitches together a dozen resorts across the French-Swiss border, and it has built a genuine reputation as a mountain-biking capital — the World Cup downhill and cross-country races here draw the sport’s actual best riders, and the trail network that gets built for competition stays open to the public all summer. I am, generously, an intermediate rider, and the blue and green trails were still more technical and better maintained than almost anything I’d ridden at home. The chairlift ride up with a bike rack under my dangling feet, looking down at pine forest and the switchbacks I was about to attempt badly, was its own kind of thrill before I’d pedalled a metre.
By winter the same lifts serve skiers instead, and the resort becomes noticeably calmer and more family-oriented — wide, well-groomed pistes link into the broader Portes du Soleil circuit for anyone who wants to ski across into Switzerland for lunch, which Lia and I did on a whim and then spent an hour figuring out how to ski back before the lifts closed.
A museum for music boxes, of all things
The detail that stuck with me most, though, had nothing to do with sport. Tucked in the village is the Musée de la Musique Mécanique, a small but genuinely captivating collection of music boxes, barrel organs, and automated instruments, some dating back to the 18th century, all still working and demonstrated by a guide who clearly loves the machines more than the paycheck. We went in expecting ten quiet minutes and stayed for an hour, watching a mechanical orchestra of tiny painted figures saw away at miniature violins while a barrel organ the size of a wardrobe filled the room with sound. It felt like an odd thing to find in a mountain-biking and ski town, and that oddness is exactly what made it worth the detour.
The village itself is compact, wood-shingled, unpretentious in a way some of its flashier Portes du Soleil neighbours aren’t, and it wears its two very different identities — race-circuit intensity and family-ski gentleness — without much friction. It just changes clothes twice a year.
When to go: Late June through August for the mountain-bike trails and the World Cup atmosphere if your visit lines up with it; December through March for the skiing, which stays reliably good thanks to altitude and the sheer size of the connected Portes du Soleil terrain. The museum is open, and worth it, in both seasons.
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