La Grave

Few villages in the Alps stand face to face with a great mountain the way La Grave does with La Meije. The old stone houses climb a slope above the gorge of the Romanche at about 1,500 metres, and directly across the valley the northern side of the Meije rises to 3,984 metres, hung with glaciers that seem close enough to touch. La Grave belongs to the association of the Most Beautiful Villages of France, and its hamlets, among them Le Chazelet, Ventelon and Les Terrasses, perch higher still on the same sunny slope, each with its own view of the massif.

Above the rooftops stands the church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, the oldest monument in the upper Romanche valley. Its Romanesque core goes back to the 11th century and shows the Lombard influence that spread through the Alps in the Middle Ages, most clearly in the vaulted apse. The church suffered during the Wars of Religion and was rebuilt afterwards; beside it stand the chapel of the White Penitents, raised in the 17th century, and a small cemetery known for its distinctive crosses. The village grew up on the old mule track between Grenoble and Briançon, a few kilometres below the Col du Lautaret.

La Meije holds a special place in the history of mountaineering. It was one of the last great summits of the Alps to be climbed: the Grand Pic was reached only on 16 August 1877, by Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau with the guides Pierre Gaspard and his son. A century later, in the 1970s, cable cars were built from La Grave up onto the glaciers of the Meije at around 3,200 metres. Below them there are no groomed runs, only vast high-mountain slopes and couloirs, and La Grave became a legend among freeride skiers. In the shaded valley, frozen waterfalls draw ice climbers each winter, while in summer the Plateau d'Emparis above the village offers lakes that mirror the whole Meije range.

Getting there

Briançon is about 30 km to the east in a straight line, over the Col du Lautaret, and has a railway station on the line from Gap; Gap itself is about 57 km to the south as the crow flies, beyond the mountains. The nearest airport is Chambéry (CMF), about 74 km to the north, but most travellers come through Grenoble and its airport, or Lyon, and follow the Romanche valley road (D1091), which runs through the village; Grenoble is about 80 km away by road.