Mountain & Ski Resorts
Snow, altitude and the architecture of the chalet built these towns, from Alpine villages to Andean lakes. Mountain resorts are winter's capital cities — and, increasingly, summer's secret ones.
A mountain resort exists because someone decided that people would come to the cold on purpose, and most of these places can name the person and the year.
The season was invented. Johannes Badrutt wagered English guests in 1864 that they could sit outdoors at St Moritz in January, won, and created the winter season. Before that the Alps emptied after summer. Every resort here descends from that bet or from a railway company making the same one.
Altitude is the business model. Snow reliability, glacier skiing into June, thin air that makes a golf ball fly further, and the dry cold that doctors once prescribed for tuberculosis — the whole economy sits on a number of metres.
Two kinds of town. Some are villages that acquired a lift: Kitzbühel was a silver and copper town, Zermatt a farming hamlet, and their streets predate the sport. Others were drawn on empty ground for it, and Courchevel is numbered by altitude like a price list.
The other half came for the cool. Before air conditioning, altitude was the cure for summer: Shimla took the entire government of British India seventeen hundred kilometres uphill every year until 1939, Karuizawa was founded by a Canadian missionary in 1886 because a thousand metres is several degrees cooler than Tokyo, and Campos do Jordão was a sanatorium before it was a resort. These towns have no lift culture and belong here anyway.
Summer is the honest test. A resort that empties in July is an industry; one that fills with walkers and cyclists is a place.
Look at what was there before the lift — or before the heat drove people up.