Deficit and impacted by climate change, the small resort of La Sambuy, located near Lake Annecy in the Bauges massif (Haute-Savoie), will close its doors on Sunday after more than 60 years of existence. Managed by the municipal authority of Faverges-Seythenex, this medium mountain area between 1150 and 1850 meters above sea level, suffers “from a real financial problem to which is added a climatic problem”, explained Jacques Dalex, the mayor of the common.
The small family resort – equipped with a chairlift and three ski lifts – is nevertheless “one of the rare resorts in France to have more turnover in summer than in winter”, according to Lionel Muraz, its director, which underlines its “avant-garde” side. The winter season was reduced to 30% of the activity of the area which had 10 slopes and operated without artificial snow. But the chronic operating deficit is expected at “500,000 euros for the year 2023”, underlines the mayor. And the station would have needed “a lot of investment” in the years to come to renew its equipment and materials.
The Faverges-Seythenex Municipal Council voted in mid-June to close the ski lifts at the end of the 2023 summer season and a “global reflection” was launched on the reconversion of the site. “There comes a time when we have to open our eyes,” said the councilor. Global warming and snowmaking difficulties have also weighed in the balance, he assures. “The winter seasons are becoming more and more difficult here as elsewhere. (…) Climate change leads us to revise our ways of seeing.”
The closure will not only impact the practice of skiing, according to the director of the station. “There is almost nothing left that can continue,” he explains, while La Sambuy offers different activities such as rail tobogganing, mountain biking or paragliding flights. According to him, around forty people, including seasonal workers, work throughout the year in the ski lifts and various satellite professions such as restaurants, equipment rental, ski instructors, refuges, etc.
From Sunday evening, the team of the station – five permanent agents who will be offered reclassification solutions – will have the mission “to secure the site” and to “store and maintain the equipment”, indicates Lionel Muraz. The law provides for a period of three years for the dismantling of ski lifts. Opposed to this closure, the association Tous ensemble pour La Sambuy had launched a petition in the spring “for a sustainable 4-season future” which collected 1910 signatures in the hope of avoiding its abandonment.
The station “generated economic benefits”, argues the president of the association, Christian Bailly. An interim appeal intended to stop the closure decision and request subsidies for a reconversion project focused on a return to nature, was rejected by the Grenoble administrative court on August 23. More than 180 ski areas have been closed in France since the 1970s, the vast majority of them unprofitable family micro-resorts located in mid-mountains, according to the count of geographer Pierre-Alexandre Metral, a doctoral student at the University of Grenoble specializing in reconversion strategies.
