Sights in Venosc — 2 of Our Favourites

An intricate gondola or cable car station's machinery is housed indoors. Features include tracks, wheels, motors, concrete walls, a wooden ceiling, and a row of windows.

1. Behind the scenes at Jandri

Location: Les Deux Alpes

Step inside the heart of Les Deux Alpes’ newest lift and discover the engineering behind the Jandri three-S. Every Tuesday from late December, with extra sessions during the February holidays, you can join a guided visit to the intermediate station at two-thousand-six-hundred metres.

Led by a member of the Sata Deux Alpes team, this one-hour tour reveals the architecture, machinery and innovation that power the resort’s most advanced lift. The intermediate station is actually two stations in one, home to vast machinery, a soaring garage and modern relaxation areas.

Faster, smoother and designed for the future, the new Jandri three-S transforms the journey to three-thousand-two-hundred metres. It’s a rare chance to see what happens behind the scenes. Visits are in French only.

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A group of people, including a child, explore a breathtaking blue ice cave, looking up in awe at its magnificent frozen formations.

2. Ice cave

Location: Les Deux Alpes

Walk through a two-hundred-metre gallery to reach a magical network of rooms carved twenty metres below the surface of the snow, deep inside the glacier.

The ice caves in Les Deux Alpes offer a true journey back to the ice age, with ethereal sculptures of dinosaurs and an impressive mammoth measuring six metres long and ten metres wide, all hewn directly from the Roche-Mantel glacier. Clever lighting adds to the atmosphere, creating a strange and captivating experience as you wander through the frozen world. Dug entirely by hand with nothing more than ice picks, the cave network consists of eight grottos, three rooms and the long entrance gallery, and takes around five months to complete each year.

Visit the website or ask at the tourist office for this season’s prices and opening times. The caves generally open in line with the lift schedule. Tickets are available at the ski pass offices, online, and at the tourist office.

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