Tignes: The Village Under the Lake

The Tignes dam, also called the Chevril, was planned from 1930, begun in 1941 in the upper Isère valley, and its reservoir needed the site of the old village of Tignes. The 387 villagers facing expulsion fought it with lawsuits, with the national press and with fires on the site that brought first the Garde mobile and then the CRS to guard the works; in 1952, after the cemetery had been moved, the holdouts were removed by force, the church and the houses were dynamited and old Tignes went under. President Vincent Auriol inaugurated the dam on 4 July 1953. In 1956, with state subsidies, some of the surviving Tignards founded a ski resort six kilometres above the dam. Designed by the engineer André Coyne with Jean-Louis Molimard as project director, the wall is about 180 m high — the highest dam in France, and the highest arch dam in Europe when it was built — close to 300 m across, up to 50 m thick, on foundations 20 m deep, holding 235 million cubic metres. In the late 1980s Jean-Marie Pierret and a team of painters covered it with an 18,000 m² fresco of Hercules holding up the world, once the largest in the world; the weather has taken nearly all of it.