Chamouni

Chamouni, or CHAMONIX (Lat. Campus munitus, from the shelter of the mountains), a celebrated valley and village among the French Alps, in the department of Upper Savoy, lying 53 miles ESE. of Geneva, at an elevation of about 3400 feet above the level of the sea. The valley, bounded on the E. by the Col de Balme, is about 13 miles long and 2' broad, and is traversed by the Arve. On the north side lies Mont Brévent and the chain of the Aiguilles Rouges, and on the south, the giant group of Mont Blanc, from which enormous glaciers glide down, even in summer, almost to the bottom of the valley. The chief of these are the Glacier des Bossons, des Bois, de l'Argentière, and du Tour; the Glacier des Bois expands in its upper course into a great mountain-lake of ice called the Mer de Glace. The village of Chamouni owes its origin and its alternative name, Le Prieuré, to the Benedictine convent founded here before 1099. Until 1741, however, the valley was little sought; the region was known, from the savageness of its inhabitants, by the name of Les Montagnes Mandites, or 'accursed mountains.' In that year it was visited by two Englishmen, Pococke and Wyndham, who described it in the Transactions of the Royal Society, but it was only in 1787 that the attention of travellers was effectually called to it by the Genevese naturalist, De Saussure, and others. Since then the number of visitors has gradually increased; now over 15,000 tourists are accommodated annually in the large hotels that have sprung up in the village, where an English chapel was opened in 1860. Grazing and such farming as the elevation allows are carried on, but most of the people are in some fashion dependent on the strangers for their income. Here the best guides are to be found for the neighbouring Alps, and from this point Mont Blanc is usually ascended. At the article ALPS there is a view of Chamouni, whose beauties have been celebrated by Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Lamartine, and Ruskin. Pop. of village, 600. See E. Whymper's admirable Guide to Chamonix and Mont Blanc (1896).