Saint-Honoré 1500
A French purpose-built resort on the Plateau Matheysin whose property development collapsed before it was finished; the lifts ran only from 1989 to 2004 and the half-built village is now a well-known urban-exploration site.
- Region
- Isère
- Country
- France
- Status
- abandoned
- Year opened
- 1989
- Year closed
- 2004
- Reason for closure
- The 1,500-bed property development was halted in March 1993 and went into liquidation in June 1995, leaving the ski area without the accommodation base it was designed around. Snow at 1,500-2,000 m then became too unreliable, the lift operator SATA declined to take on the installations, and the lifts were effectively abandoned from 2003 and stopped for good after 2004.
History
Saint-Honoré 1500, also called La Chaud, lies above the village of Saint-Honoré on the Plateau Matheysin in the Isère, roughly 40 km south of Grenoble. It was conceived in the 1960s as a 1,500-bed resort that would eventually link to Alpe du Grand Serre, but the scheme advanced only in fits and starts through a succession of owners, some of whom were later implicated in fraud. The ski lifts finally went in for the 1989 season: two Poma fixed-grip quads, La Chaud and Des Tibannes, plus a drag lift at Charlet, with a beginner drag added in 1991. The ski area ran from about 1,500 m at La Chaud up to roughly 2,024 m at the Col de l'Ouillière, with a long red and a long blue piste off the Tibannes chair and a single blue off La Chaud. The property company stopped work in March 1993 and was liquidated in June 1995, so the apartment blocks were never completed. With poor snow and no operator willing to take the lifts on, they were abandoned around 2003 and the area shut after 2004. The lifts were dismantled between 2005 and 2007 and largely sold on to other resorts. What remains is a half-finished concrete village of empty and unfinished buildings, widely photographed by urban explorers, with the municipality still weighing whether to complete or demolish it. Individual piste names were never formally recorded.
Lifts
| Name | Type | Manufacturer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Télésiège de la Chaud | Chairlift - Quad - Fixed | Poma | 525 m long, 100 m vertical; in service 1989-2004. Sold in 2007 to Saint-François-Longchamp, where it was re-erected as the TSF4 des Clochettes |
| Télésiège des Tibannes | Chairlift - Quad - Fixed | Poma | Poma Alpha Evolutif, 1,750 m long, 532 m vertical; in service 1989-2004. Parts were reused in 2005 by Alpe du Grand Serre to extend its TSF4 Souriou and the remainder was sold in 2014 to Porté-Puymorens (TSF4 de l'Estagnol) |
| Téléski du Charlet | Platter | Poma | 320 m long, 200 m vertical; in service 1989-2004 |
| Téléski des Oiseaux | Platter | Poma | 325 m long, 34 m vertical beginner lift; in service 1991-2004 |
Sources and further reading
More in France
Location
44.9553, 5.8075