Briançon

Why go

Briançon is what happens when a frontier town is built at 1,300 metres: walls stepped down a rocky spur, steep lanes with mountain water racing down a channel in the middle, and forts perched on every surrounding height. It is also a true mountain base, with ski slopes, high passes famous from the Tour de France and walks in every direction. Swap the Paris pavement for thin, clear air, bright mountain light and a fortress town that still feels lived in.

History

Briançon has always been about a pass. The Romans knew it as Brigantium, a station on the road over the Montgenèvre pass between Italy and Gaul, and for two thousand years armies, merchants and pilgrims have come down this valley. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Dauphins of Viennois, and in 1343 Dauphin Humbert II granted the Briançonnais a charter of liberties that made its mountain communities, the ‘escartons', largely self-governing until the Revolution. The Dauphiné passed to the French crown a few years later.

The town burned more than once; a fire in 1624 destroyed most of it, and another on 26 January 1692 was even worse. That same year Vauban drew up plans to rebuild and fortify it, and he came back in 1700 to refine them. The result is the Cité Vauban: a compact town inside bastioned walls, its streets laid out steeply down the slope.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 moved the border to the ridge just above the town, turning Briançon into a front-line stronghold facing Savoy. Between 1721 and 1734 the Marquis d’Asfeld built a ring of forts on the surrounding heights, linked to the town by the single-arched Pont d’Asfeld, thrown across the Durance gorge in 1731.

In the twentieth century the dry, sunny mountain air brought another kind of visitor: patients seeking a cure for tuberculosis in the sanatoriums built on the slopes, and later skiers and walkers. In 2008 Briançon’s fortifications were inscribed by UNESCO with eleven other sites as the Fortifications of Vauban.

UNESCO World Heritage: Fortifications of Vauban (2008)