Alpe Bianca
Two skilifts in the Valli di Lanzo, built in the early 1980s and finished by 1992, standing beside the concrete skeleton of a block of flats the developer could never sell.
- Region
- Piedmont
- Country
- Italy
- Status
- abandoned
- Year opened
- early 1980s
- Year closed
- 1992
- Reason for closure
- The property company behind the resort could not sell the apartments it was building, and on top of that there was too little snow and the site was not easy to reach.
History
Alpe Bianca lies above the hamlet of Tornetti di Viu in the Valli di Lanzo, reached by the comunal road up from Viu, on typical alpine grassland partly taken back by scrub, running from about 1,400 m to the 1,950 m of Monte Ciarm. The resort was created at the start of the 1980s with two skilifts and ran for barely a decade, stopping in 1992. The cause recorded is a property failure rather than a skiing one: the owner was a real estate company from Sanremo that could not sell the flats it was putting up, and the lack of snow and the awkward access compounded it. What dominates the site is not the lifts at all but, in the census's words, the skeleton of the condominium built at the foot of the second skilift and never completed - the surveyors graded the environmental damage six out of six on its account, against a feasibility of clearing it of two. It is one of the clearest cases in this dataset of a ski area that existed mainly to sell apartments. Course names were never compiled; the coordinates come from the mapped Alpe Bianca lift station.
Lifts
| Name | Type | Manufacturer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unnamed lift | Surface lift | One of two skilifts, running from about 1,400 m towards the 1,950 m summit of Monte Ciarm | |
| Unnamed lift | Surface lift | The second skilift. The unfinished condominium stands at its base |
Sources and further reading
More in Italy
Location
45.2492, 7.3247