Megève Is the French Alps Resort Old Money Never Left

Megève owes its status as a ski resort to one family's irritation with Switzerland. In the early 1920s, Baroness Noémie de Rothschild, said to have grown frustrated that her preferred Swiss resorts were attracting an increasingly fashionable crowd, decided France needed a winter resort of its own for high society, and chose Megève, then a quiet farming village in Haute-Savoie below Mont Blanc, to build it. Her family financed the first hotels, a cable car and a golf course, and the resort has stayed close to that founding template, low-rise chalets around a compact medieval village centre, ever since.

A resort that stayed deliberately unflashy

Where Courchevel and Val d'Isère built upward through the postwar decades with high-rise ski-in chalets and a younger, louder crowd, Megève's local authorities restricted development to preserve its 1920s scale, keeping the resort largely free of the tower-block architecture common elsewhere in the French Alps. The result is a village that still looks much as it did in early photographs, its central square ringed by 17th-century buildings rather than ski shops.

Horse-drawn sleighs and a private airfield

Megève was also among the first Alpine resorts to build its own airfield, still used today for private aircraft, a detail that has quietly kept the village accessible to a wealthier, more discreet visiting crowd than its lift-pass numbers alone would suggest. Horse-drawn sleighs, calèches, still operate as a genuine form of transport around the pedestrianised centre rather than as a novelty for visitors.

French old money's actual habits

Unlike resorts built primarily around après-ski nightlife, Megève's social life still runs largely through long lunches at mountain restaurants reachable only on skis or on foot, several of which, among them Flocons de Sel, hold Michelin stars, and through membership at the Megève Country Club rather than any single nightclub. Members of the French aristocracy and business families who have wintered there for generations tend to keep second homes rather than book hotels, part of why the resort has stayed comparatively low-profile against its Alpine rivals.

Traveller tips

• Megève has no train station of its own; most visitors fly into Geneva, around 75 minutes away by road, or into Chambéry.
• The resort's skiable terrain is more modest than Courchevel's or Val d'Isère's, better suited to intermediate skiers and families than expert terrain-hunters.
• Restaurant bookings at the village's Michelin-starred mountain restaurants should be made well ahead for the February half-term peak.
• Megève's altitude, lower than many purpose-built French resorts, means it can see less reliable snow cover in warmer winters.