A day in Grenoble

This holiday wasn’t just about skiing because a) my legs would probably not last the distance and b) Margaret is not a skier, so it would be a bit of a miserable time for her if we disappeared all day, every day.

At the start of the holiday, I bought a book of 10 tickets which can be exchanged for a day ski pass and the plan was to use five this holiday and five the next. It works out at £355 for the book so £35 per day, which is an OK saving on a day-rate and gives you a bit of flexibility.

We’d been promised decent weather on Thursday, 6 February, so we’d agreed to visit Grenoble. Sam and Lucy had been there in January to pick up Lucy’s mum from the airport and said it was a nice place. They’d wanted to visit the Bastille, which overlooks the town but the cable car service was suspended for annual maintenance and there wasn’t time to walk up the steep hill.

The sunny weather in Bourg-Saint-Maurice didn’t hold as far down as Grenoble and it was a little dull with a chilly wind, but perfectly OK for a wander (as long as you kept moving). I’d been to Grenoble maybe 25 years ago on a car launch and I remember quite a snowy day and a city in a great bowl between mountains. That’s pretty much it, although the city will have expanded a bit since then.

It sits on a flat plain surrounded by high mountains. In the ice age, the site was towards the end of a large glacier and, as the ice melted, the valley became dammed and a long lake formed. It’s the floor of this former lake which the town is now built on. The Isere river, which runs through Bourg, flows down into Grenoble and makes a much wider river those 70 miles or so downstream.

Scenery on the journey down is spectacular and, once in Grenoble, we parked up in the museum car park, a multi-storey with the narrowest of ramps and smallest of spaces. We left the back end of the BMW hanging out by a foot or so (I think the place was designed with the Renault 5/Clio in mind). From there it was a short walk to the cable-car station and a spectacular (some might say scary) ride up to the Bastille.

As fortresses go, this was a strange one. It dominates the town and the valley and you get magnificent views, you can even see Mont Blanc quite clearly (and that must be about 100 miles distant). It’s a modern fort (well late 19th century) and most of its firepower is not directed at the valley and town, but behind the fort up to the slope of the mountain upon which it’s built. The defence plan identified the weak point as the mountain and so most guns point in that direction. There’s even a sneaky set of fire points in the mountainside above the fort, linked by a tunnel to the fort, where soldiers could snipe at besiegers. You can walk down the tunnel and around the walls into the gate of the fortress.

Panorama shots by Lucy on her iPhone

The Bastille was never besieged, soon after it was built Savoy became part of France and the threat from Italy moved further away to higher Alpine passes.

Grenoble has a history of science (there's an Ave Charles Darwin in recognition of the botanist) and geologists based here played a key role in understanding the formation of the Alps and interpreting the abundant evidence for folding and upthrusts of rock strata. You get a great view of magnificent folds in the surrounding mountains where glaciation has scraped valley sides sheer and given what amounts to a cross section of strata. It's no wonder the place spawned a number of famous French geologists.

We’d thought we might have lunch at the restaurant in the Bastille, but it was too cold to sit on the terrace and enjoy the view, so we reasoned, we’d get a better meal in the old town. The cable car ride down is quite exciting/scary depending upon your point of view. I'd decided to video it and, as you can see here, Margaret made a bit of a fuss! She says I’m mean for putting this up; I say she’s spoiled my nice video.

Safely back on terra firma, we walked into the heart of the old town through a nice park to the church of St Andre, an old brick-built church with public squares both sides and a nearby restaurant where we had a pretty good lunch.

Afterwards, we had a short walk around. Because Grenoble is surrounded by mountains, like Chamonix, you can turn into a street and find a mountain filling your view. It gives an interesting perspective to the city.

There are lots of references to Napoleon in Grenoble, including restaurants and a hotel where he stayed. On March 1, 1815, Napoleon landed at Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, having escaped from Elba. A more obvious place to land would have been the valley of the Rhone river. From there the march to Paris would have been far easier and a lot faster, but he feared the royalist sentiments of the inhabitants of that region so he took the more difficult road through the Alps to Grenoble.

On March 7, 1815 his small Imperial column met the 5th Regiment of the Line, not far from Grenoble. Napoleon stepped forward and faced the muskets alone. With remarkable bravado and by using his charisma, he managed to win over the regiment. With the cry: "Vive L'Empéreur" the 5th changed sides as one man. The gates of Grenoble opened and the Napoleon received a warm welcome. Perhaps they appreciated the future tourism kudos a hotel could command with a “Napoleon was here” plaque above the door.

Of course, in June (just three months later) he met Wellington for the first time in battle at Waterloo (and received another warm welcome), but modern Grenoble makes the most of his short stay in the city.