Chamonix is the spiritual home of all things extreme. Host of the first Winter Olympics in 1924 and hemmed in by glaciers, this place is dripping in history and the scenery will take your breath away, as will the Aiguille du Midi cable car which transports hordes of skiers from the edge of town up to the start of the famous 24km-long Vallée Blanche run, or the Grands Montets cable car above Argentière if you like your terrain steep and deep. With a motorway connection from Geneva to within a few miles of the resort, extreme skiing has never been so convenient.

A little too convenient, it seems, for some of the local inhabitants. The English have taken over and only want the French to cook, said Bernard Prud‚homme, the outspoken director of Chamonix’s tourist board, who has seen something of a British invasion in recent years. A 70sqm apartment in Chamonix now sells for around E300,000 ˆ about 10 times the average salary in France and property prices in the area have increased 15 per cent per year since 2002, with Brits making up a sixth of the population. Surely that’s good news for the tourist office?

It brings two problems with it. Firstly, English has now become the lingua franca about town. Secondly, the rocketing house prices are excluding many of the locals who have lived in the area all of their lives. Chamonix built its success on the back of the men who came to conquer Mont Blanc, headed in 1786 by Paccard, a local doctor, and Balmat, the founder of a guiding dynasty. Now, more than two centuries later, this 19th-century mountain town is morphing into a 21st-century developer’s dream.

This article is courtesy of Time Out Guides