In Moûtiers

June 9, 2025

We didn’t do much today. It was a planned rest day ahead of Col de la Madeleine tomorrow, followed by 4 nights / 3 days in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. We had thought about riding 6 flat km up to the Thermes in La Léchère but that didn’t happen either.

Instead, we had coffee and pastries at a local boulangerie, walked around to find the big-box Carrefour to pick up breakfast supplies for tomorrow, ate our leftover pizza for lunch, and later went out for ice cream. In between we hung out in our little studio apartment.

Our apartment is in that yellow building, at 98 Place Aristide

A closer view. We have the smallest of the 3 tourist apartments and the only one on the ground floor. That’s one of our windows above the black van.

And here’s the entrance. We go in and out through the basement (there’s a couple of steps down) since the owners have a couple of little dogs that have free run of the garden, which is behind the big metal gate on the left of the photo above. That’s where our bikes are.

Moutiers is a town that’s seen better days. Many businesses are closed Sundays and Mondays (or just Pentecost/Whit Monday) while many others seem to be closed forever. Sad.

These four pillars in the big-box part of town near the Carrefour, are all that remain of the former Royal Saltworks

I was intrigued so I did a little research. From the Coeur de Tarantaise tourism website, translated by Google:

Where is it [salt] found?

In mines or quarries dug into deposits, it's rock salt. In salt marshes, it's sea salt. In underground springs, highly concentrated due to soils laden with rock salt. And the salt of Moûtiers, where did it come from?

In the case of Moûtiers, the salt comes from a spring captured in Salins-Fontaine, 2 kilometers from Moûtiers. The name of this neighboring commune derives from the presence of salt in this water.

Since there was insufficient space for salt production in Salins-Fontaine, the water was then transported to Moûtiers via canals.

In Moûtiers, salt was extracted in two ways:

by evaporation, heating the water in large boilers, then recovering the remaining salt
by crystallization, by making the water run along the ropes stretched over the pillars, the crystallized salt could then be scraped and recovered

This latter method uses less wood for heating and is the reason for the pillars. Salt production stopped in Moutiers when Savoy became French and the salt industry here couldn’t compete with sea salt from the Mediterranean.

Some of the (mostly decrepit) old buildings had large murals

The main pedestrian street at 10 a.m. There were a few more people around 4 p.m. but still very few.

There’s a big old cathedral dating from the days when Moûtiers was an important crossroads

The town is built right on the banks of the Isère. That’s a covered pedestrian bridge down there.

Looking the other way. The tower in the background is part of the cathedral, which seemed once to have cloisters with corner towers.

At least there were places open to buy groceries (the cooking facilities here are very limited so we only got granola, yogurt, fruit, and juice for tomorrow’s breakfast) and we should be able to get a restaurant dinner. Our choices may be limited to kebabs, Asian (the menu includes Thai and Vietnamese dishes and fondue too), or pizza, but there will be something.

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