Golf de Tignes

Few golf courses on earth demand as much from the calendar as Golf de Tignes. Sitting at roughly 2,100 metres above sea level in the Tarentaise Valley, the course operates only during the brief alpine summer — typically late June through September — when the snowpack finally retreats enough to reveal fairways carved into one of France's most celebrated ski resorts. The same terrain that draws winter athletes from across Europe becomes, for a few short months, a genuinely unusual place to play golf.

The layout reflects its mountain reality: tight, sloping terrain where keeping the ball in play matters far more than raw distance, and where the thin air and dramatic elevation changes make club selection genuinely puzzling for first-time visitors. The surrounding peaks of the Vanoise massif provide a backdrop that is, by any honest measure, extraordinary.

Tignes itself shares the valley with Val d'Isère, forming one of the great ski domains in the Alps, and that resort identity shapes the golf too — it caters to holidaying visitors rather than competitive purists, offering a memorable experience grounded firmly in place and season.