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The impact of the ski industry is immense. Areas of land on the relatively flat valley bottom which were between the original village settlements have been in-filled with chalet, hotel and apartment block development and also with ski related services and transport related land-uses. Nursery slopes, ski lift stations, winter and summer mountain sport activities(eg skating rinks, mountain bike cabins, climbing walls), ski related shops, car parks and ski bus lay-byes have covered large tracts of land ones used as pasture and for the growing of winter food crops.
A feature of the changing geography of Serre Chevalier 1400 is the increasing realisation by the local authorities and residents that the resort is more and more reliant on out-of-ski-season visitors such as mountain walkers, mountain-bikers and even touring heritage tourists. Like other resorts in the area that are not as high as longer season resorts such as Les Deux Alpes, Serre Chevalier is now seeing a change from the large scale concrete developments of the 1970s, and 1980s and a tendency to make any new-builds in traditional materials and designs. The older and more recent parts of the settlement are subject to degrees of hazard. The streams that run down the valley sides past Le Bez and La Salle, and indeed the Guisanne itself, are massively subject to flash-flooding, particularly in times of heavy rainfall combined with snow melt. Flooding of property and danger to life are frequently experienced particularly by those building and people located on land other than that raised in some way from the Guisanne’s main flood plain.
In terms of tourism the region has seen a change from a traditional mountain farming economy to a summer tourism economy to its hey-day as a winter tourism area and now increasingly, the area is active right through the year. |
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