Verbier

For most of its history Verbier was a cluster of farms and summer pastures on a terrace high above the Val de Bagnes, part of a parish first mentioned in 1178 and governed from Le Châble in the valley below, where a castle called the abbaye was recorded in 1287. The valley lived from alpine farming and was repeatedly struck by floods of the Dranse, most destructively in 1818, and in the 19th century its villages were divided by violent feuds between radicals and conservatives.

Verbier has received guests from other European countries since the early 20th century. During the First World War the local economy suffered from the loss of tourists, and from 1916 to 1918 Verbier, like other Alpine villages, housed interned German, French and British soldiers in need of medical care. A road from the valley reached Verbier Village in 1936, a local tourism society was founded in 1937 to guide development, and the road was extended to the terrace in 1949.

The decisive change came in 1950, when the first chairlift was built up to Les Ruinettes. The railway reached Le Châble in 1953, the Mauvoisin dam was built in the upper valley in the 1950s, and a cable car from Le Châble opened in 1975. Verbier became one of the best-known ski resorts in the Alps, popular with British and Scandinavian visitors and second-home owners. In 2015 an investigation of building permits found about fifty breaches of local and cantonal building law, and in 2021 Bagnes merged with Vollèges to form the municipality of Val de Bagnes.

Two things give Verbier its reputation. One is freeriding: the resort is regarded as one of the world's great off-piste destinations, and the Xtreme de Verbier, first held on the Bec des Rosses in 1996, grew into the Freeride World Tour, whose final is still held here. A community of photographers and artists has grown out of winter-sports action photography, and the resort also lies on the Haute Route ski tour from Chamonix to Zermatt and at the finish of the army's Patrouille des Glaciers race.

The other is music. The Verbier Festival, founded by the Swedish expatriate Martin Engström in 1994, brings leading soloists to the resort for about two and a half weeks each summer, with concerts in the chalice-shaped church and the Salle des Combins, an academy for young musicians and free fringe events. The resort has also hosted stages of the Tour de France and the Tour de Suisse.

Beneath the international surface the valley remains French-speaking and largely Catholic, with old chapels scattered through its hamlets. Since the late 1960s Verbier has attracted celebrities and royal families, many with chalets of their own, and English is spoken widely alongside French.

Verbier had about 2,800 permanent residents in 2006, but the number of people in the resort can rise to around 35,000 in the winter season. The wider former municipality of Bagnes had about 8,100 residents in 2019, a large share of them foreign nationals, among them noticeable British and Scandinavian communities.

The economy is tourism: ski lifts, ski schools and mountain guides, restaurants, shops, building and the care of chalets that stand empty for much of the year. Children attend local state schools up to secondary level, then travel down to the valley, and there are private international schools in the resort.

Life swings between seasons. Winter fills the streets, lifts and après-ski bars, summer brings walkers, mountain bikers and festival audiences, and spring and November are quiet. The resort is reached by a single road or the gondola from Le Châble, and the growth of tourist building and its oversight by the authorities have long been debated locally.

Raclette is the dish of the Valais and of Verbier: a round of cheese is heated, in front of a fire or under a special machine, and the melted surface is scraped onto plates. It is served with boiled potatoes, cornichons, pickled onions and black tea or Fendant, the local white wine. Melting cheese this way in front of a fire is recorded in the Valais as early as 1574, and the dish was promoted as the national dish of the canton at the 1909 exhibition in Sion.

Cheese remains part of the local farming economy: the herdsmen of Verbier and Médières share a cattle-breeding cooperative and have run a central dairy since 1960. The assiette valaisanne, a platter of cured meats, cheese and rye bread, is another Valais speciality.

In the resort itself, food follows the visitors. Pizzerias, mountain restaurants on the slopes and bars serving burgers stand around the Place Centrale and along Rue de Médran, and in peak season the pubs are packed in the early evening before dinner and nightclubs that stay open into the small hours. Prices are high.