Vanoise

The Vanoise was created in July 1963 as France's first national park, and for a reason you can still watch grazing at dusk: the Alpine ibex, hunted to a last few hundred animals holed up across the border in Italy's Gran Paradiso. The two parks share a 14-kilometre boundary along the crest and have been twinned since 1972 — together the largest protected block in the western Alps — and the Vanoise now carries France's biggest ibex population, a couple of thousand strong, along with chamois in the thousands and reintroduced bearded vultures overhead.

The park is the high massif between two deep valleys of the Savoie: the Tarentaise of the Isère to the north, the Maurienne of the Arc to the south. In between stand the Grande Casse (3,855 metres, the roof of the park), a hundred-odd summits over 3,000, and the Glaciers de la Vanoise, a genuine ice dome draped over the plateau between Pralognan and Termignon. What stands around it is the other half of the story: Val-d'Isère, Tignes, the Trois Vallées, La Plagne, Les Arcs — the largest ski estates on earth ring the core on nearly every side, and the park is the quiet centre their lift lines stop short of. It nearly wasn't: the 1969–71 "affaire de la Vanoise", a scheme to declassify core ground for a resort extension, was defeated by France's first great conservation campaign, and the precedent has protected every park since.

Walkers get the best of it. The GR55 crosses the heart of the park, the Tour des Glaciers de la Vanoise makes a four-to-five-day circuit of the ice cap, and the refuge network — Col de la Vanoise, l'Arpont, Entre Deux Eaux — is dense enough to walk hut to hut without ever carrying a tent.

What's worth knowing before you go

Pralognan-la-Vanoise is the historic mountaineering gateway on the Tarentaise side; rail gets you to Bourg-Saint-Maurice in the north or Modane in the south, with buses onward. Huts open mid-June to mid-September and the Col de la Vanoise path is a procession in August — book ahead. Snow lingers on the high crossings well into July.

The connoisseur's approach is from the Maurienne: Bonneval-sur-Arc and Bessans see a fraction of the Tarentaise traffic, the baroque chapels of the high villages are part of the walk, and the south-side light on the glaciers is better in the evening anyway.