Tignes-Val d'Isère

This is the domain long marketed as the Espace Killy, after Val d'Isère's own triple Olympic champion Jean-Claude Killy — two resorts, Tignes and Val d'Isère, threaded into a single lift-linked network above the Haute-Tarentaise. Val d'Isère sits at the head of one valley, a real old village grown into a resort; Tignes lies over the ridge in a higher, treeless bowl of purpose-built bases strung up the mountain from Tignes les Brévières at the bottom to Val Claret at the top. Lifts and pistes tie the two together over the Tovière and Bellevarde ridges, so you can start the day above one resort and finish it above the other. The marketed figure is around 300 km of piste on one pass, most of it high and open, crowned by the Grande Motte glacier above Tignes at 3456 m.

Altitude and honest snow, with the range to back it up. The domain runs high — the bulk of the skiing sits above the treeline and the top reaches glacier terrain — so it holds cold snow when lower resorts go patchy, opens early and stays open late. Add a genuine lift link between two resorts of real character and a freeride reputation few French areas match, and you have a mountain that rewards both the mileage-hungry piste skier and the off-piste hunter.

A high, exposed, above-the-treeline domain built for reliable snow and open terrain rather than sheltered wooded runs. Most of the skiing sits between roughly 1550 m and 3456 m, much of it in wide bowls and off long ridges, so the character is big, bright and fast on a clear day and hard, wind-scoured and flat-lit when a storm sits on the mountain. Trees for a whiteout day are limited — mainly down at the lowest bases like Tignes les Brévières and La Daille — so this is high-Alpine skiing where the weather is felt more than in a low tree-line resort.