Serre Chevalier

Parc des Colombiers

Serre Chevalier is one of the major French ski destinations.

Located in the southern part of the Alps, near to the Parc National des Ecrins, in the Hautes-Alpes department of the French Alps, it enjoys a large skiing area (250 km of slopes ) and awfully bright weather, boasting three hundred days of sunlight a year.

The management of the ski area now belongs to Compagnie des Alpes.

Serre Chevalier is composed of the city of Briancon, with the villages  of Chantemerle, Villeneuve, and Le Montier-les-Bains. The ski champ Luc Alphand was born and lives in the valley of the resort. Naturally Serre Chevalier is most renowned for it’s ski area.

The lowest the skiing goes down to is at 1200m and the highest Telesiege Yret at 2760m. One of the outstanding features of Serre Chevalier is the wooded nature of the slopes. The Treeline stops at 2150m, that suggests there’s about 700m of vertical treelined slopes. The slopes are managed by the CDA. There are 66 lifts : 36 drag lifts, twenty-one chairs ( among which six 6 passengers chairs, 3 high speed quads ), three cable cars and 6 gondolas.

There are 115 slopes ( 25 Green, 33 Blue, 42 Red, 15 Black ). With its great natural terrain Serre-Chevalier is widely thought of as one of the top snow boarding destination in France.

In the summertime Serre Chevalier becomes an area devoted to canoeing, walking, cycling, trail biking, climbing, rock climbing, sledding, paragliding and often enjoying one of the most beautiful mountain areas in Europe. Serre Chevalier organizes the MTB french championships in 2008. Four lifts reopen for the summer months to take walkers and mountain riders up the mountain.

The closest airfields to Serre Chevalier are Turin in Italy and Grenoble in France. These are served by the United Kingdom’s discount airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair, providing simple access from many European towns. There’s a SNCF train line station in Brianon. It has direct trains from Paris and overnite sleeper trains.