🇫🇷 France · Southwest and the Alps
Few places in the world are as overwhelming as the Chamonix valley. You arrive and there it is, dominating everything: Mont Blanc, the roof of Western Europe at 4.807 metres, surrounded by granite spires, glaciers running down into the valley and peaks under snow all year. Chamonix is the world capital of alpinism, the place where modern mountaineering was born in the 18th century and where the first Winter Olympic Games in history were held, in 1924. It is at once a charming mountain town and an adventure base of worldwide fame.
The best part is that you do not have to be a climber to experience the high mountains. The Aiguille du Midi cable car climbs in twenty minutes from the town to 3.842 metres, leaving you face to face with Mont Blanc, among glaciers and climbers setting off for the summit. The historic red Montenvers train grinds up to the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in France, whose dramatic retreat from climate change is visible in the stairs you have to descend a little further each year to reach the ice. And viewpoints such as the Brévent give you the perfect postcard of the massif opposite.
This guide covers Chamonix with a practical eye: how to get up the Aiguille du Midi and to the Mer de Glace (with prices and bookings), which viewpoints and trails to choose, how to make the most of free valley transport with the Carte d'Hôte, how to get there from Geneva and what precautions to take at altitude, including altitude sickness. Whether you come to walk, to ski, to climb or simply to marvel at the landscape, Chamonix is one of the most spectacular destinations in all of Europe.
For centuries the Chamonix valley was an isolated, poor corner of the Alps, inhabited by farmers who feared the mountains and their glaciers, which they called 'accursed mountains'. Everything began to change in 1741, when two young Englishmen, William Windham and Richard Pococke, 'discovered' the valley for the rest of Europe and published their impressions of the Mer de Glace, setting off a fashion for visiting it. The Geneva scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure offered a reward in 1760 to whoever reached the summit of Mont Blanc, and in 1786 two men from the valley, Jacques Balmat and Doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard, made the first ascent, an act that marks the birth of alpinism. Saussure himself climbed it the following year. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Chamonix became the world capital of mountaineering and mountain tourism, until it hosted the first Winter Olympic Games in history in 1924. That whole epic, from fear of the summits to the conquest of Mont Blanc, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the Atlantic to the high mountains: the Aquitaine of Eleanor and of the English kings, the Bordeaux of wine and of the slave trade, the Basque Country of Biarritz and the Savoyard Alps, cradle of alpinism at Mont Blanc.
Read the history of Southwest and the Alps →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It is hard to imagine today, when cable cars and trains carry thousands of tourists into the high mountains, but for most of its history the Chamonix valley was a remote, poor and feared corner of the Alps. Hemmed in between peaks of more than four thousand metres and covered in glaciers that in those centuries advanced almost to the edge of the hamlets, it was a place of hard living, inhabited by farmers and shepherds who barely survived on livestock, crops and chamois hunting.
For those people, the mountains were not a beautiful spectacle but a threat. The enormous glaciers we admire today, such as the Mer de Glace, were viewed with fear and superstition: they were called 'les montagnes maudites', the accursed mountains, and dragons, witches and evil spirits were believed to live on the summits. Nobody in their right mind climbed to the heights for pleasure; Mont Blanc, the giant dominating the valley, was simply inaccessible and unexplored.
The valley historically belonged to the duchy of Savoy, a small Alpine state straddling what are today France and Italy, and its community revolved around an old religious priory founded in the Middle Ages, from which Chamonix took much of its identity. Cut off from the world by difficult roads and mountains, the valley seemed condemned to stay forgotten forever. Until, one day in 1741, two young Englishmen turned up looking for adventure.
In 1741, two young Englishmen on a leisure tour of the continent, William Windham and Richard Pococke, ventured with a group of friends into the remote valley of 'Chamouny', of which almost nothing was known in the rest of Europe. Driven by curiosity, they climbed on horseback and on foot to the Montenvers site and gazed, astonished, at the great glacier descending between the mountains. It looked to them like a frozen ocean shaken by a storm, and they named it with the name that has lasted to this day: the 'Mer de Glace', the Sea of Ice.
Back in civilisation, Windham and Pococke wrote and published accounts of their expedition, which circulated in the literary and scientific journals of England and the continent. The effect was extraordinary: those descriptions of a world of ice and impossible peaks awoke a genuine fascination in Enlightenment Europe. Suddenly travellers, naturalists, artists and the curious wanted to see those frozen wonders with their own eyes.
So, almost without meaning to, those two Englishmen launched tourism in Chamonix. Over the following decades, a growing trickle of visitors began arriving in the valley to admire the Mer de Glace and the glaciers, drawn by a new sensibility that no longer saw mountains as accursed but as a source of emotion, sublime beauty and knowledge. The valley of the 'accursed mountains' was becoming, little by little, a destination. And one enormous challenge remained on the horizon: reaching the summit of Mont Blanc.
Among those captivated by Chamonix was the Geneva scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a naturalist passionate about the geology and physics of mountains. Saussure first visited the valley in 1760 and became obsessed with Mont Blanc. Convinced that the summit had to be reached in order to study it, that same year he offered a reward to whoever managed to get to the top, or at least to find a practicable route to it.
The prize went unclaimed for twenty-six years. Reaching the summit of Mont Blanc seemed impossible: its glaciers, its crevasses, the extreme cold, the lack of oxygen and total ignorance of high-mountain conditions halted attempt after attempt. Until, on 8 August 1786, two men from the valley did it: Jacques Balmat, a chamois hunter and crystal prospector used to moving around the heights, and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, the Chamonix doctor. After an extremely hard day, they reached the summit of Mont Blanc, at 4.807 metres, and came back alive.
That ascent was not only a sporting feat: it marked the birth of alpinism as an activity. The following year, in 1787, Saussure himself climbed to the summit with a large expedition and carried out scientific experiments up there, establishing the idea of the mountain as a place of conquest and knowledge. In the town of Chamonix, a famous statue shows Balmat pointing at the summit beside Saussure. And in 1821, the valley's guides founded the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, the oldest mountain guiding company in the world, still active today. The valley of fearful farmers had become the cradle of mountaineering.
Through the 19th century, Chamonix went through a rapid transformation. The conquest of Mont Blanc opened the door to the so-called 'golden age of alpinism': one after another the great spires and summits of the massif fell, climbed by mountaineers from all over Europe —many of them British— accompanied by local guides. Chamonix became the world centre of that new passion, and its name began to be associated forever with high-mountain adventure.
At the same time, tourism grew relentlessly. The valley, which became French in 1860 when Savoy was annexed to France (after the plebiscite that brought the old duchy into Napoleon III's Second Empire), filled with hotels, inns and visitors. The arrival of the railway at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century finally opened Chamonix to the world: rail lines were built to reach the valley and, above all, ingenious mountain trains to carry tourists to the great landscapes. In 1908 the Montenvers rack railway opened, climbing to the Mer de Glace and letting any traveller see up close the glacier that had amazed Windham and Pococke.
Chamonix was establishing itself as a mountain destination without equal, able to combine elite alpinism with an increasingly mass tourism. What was still missing was the event that would put it on the world sporting map and give its name to a whole new era of winter sports.
In 1924, Chamonix made history by hosting the 'International Winter Sports Week', an event the International Olympic Committee later recognised, retroactively, as the first Winter Olympic Games in history. Skating, ice hockey, skiing, ski jumping, bobsleigh and other disciplines brought the world's best athletes together on snow for the first time, in a valley that was already a symbol of the mountains. Those Games drove the development of ski resorts and definitively established Chamonix as the capital of winter sports.
The 20th century also brought the great works that give Chamonix the shape it has today. In 1955 the Aiguille du Midi cable car opened, at the time the highest in the world, which for the first time let anyone climb in a few minutes into the high mountains, to 3.842 metres, without being a mountaineer. And in 1965 the Mont Blanc tunnel opened, an engineering feat that bored through the mountain to link Chamonix with Courmayeur, in Italy, bringing the valley into the great European routes.
Today Chamonix is, without argument, the world capital of alpinism and one of the great mountain destinations on the planet. It combines mass tourism —the cable cars, the Mer de Glace, skiing— with the most demanding mountaineering, and every August, since 2003, it hosts the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, the legendary race of some 170 kilometres around the massif. The valley is also an exceptional witness to the drama of climate change: its glaciers, starting with the Mer de Glace, retreat and thin year after year, a silent reminder that those 'accursed mountains' once feared are today a fragile treasure that has to be looked after.