French company designs huge ski resort in Central Asia

In Kyrgyzstan, the future “Three Summits” ski area will have 200 kilometers of slopes and around thirty ski lifts. Its construction is being guided by a French company.

A touch of Savoy in the heart of Asia. A huge ski area, with a touch of French spirit, will soon be built in the mountains of eastern Kyrgyzstan. Ultimately, the three resorts of the “Three Summits” area should bring together 200 kilometres of slopes and a good thirty ski lifts – the equivalent of the Swiss resort of Zermatt. The Central Asian country, or rather its president, Sadyr Japarov, came to France to entrust the project to a French company, the Société des Trois-Vallées (S3V), operator of the Courchevel ski area.

“The President of Kyrgyzstan asked to meet us in January 2023 when he came to ski with us” because he “wanted to have a ‘Courchevel’ built in his country”, recalls the President of S3V, Pascal de Thiersant, to BFM Business.

For the Kyrgyz government, there is no question of waiting: a site is quickly identified south of Lake Issyk Kul, near the town of Karakol, and a master plan is presented by the S3V in April 2024. The start of work is planned for the summer of 2025, with a view to welcoming the first skiers in December 2026. This will then only be a partial start on around sixty kilometers of slopes.

To build the first of three resorts, at the entrance to the Jyrgalan Valley, the Kyrgyz state will invest 165 million euros via a dedicated public company, officially named “Courchevel Kyrgyz” – a symbol of the winter ambitions of this small Asian country.

850,000 tourists annually

The Kyrgyz government hopes that the work will be completed by 2035. If it goes as planned, the resort will have nearly 7,000 rooms in total, enough to accommodate 850,000 tourists per year in its three resorts.

Hotels, apartments, camping, restaurants, thermal spa, shops… In total, a little over 1,600 hectares have been locked up by the state in the surrounding mountains for the entire project. Kyrgyz companies will be responsible for growing the buildings and infrastructure, with S3V (50% owned by the Savoie department) designing the estate and advising on its implementation.

Almost entirely covered in mountains and snow-covered from mid-November to mid-April, the Kyrgyz territory has nothing to be ashamed of in terms of its landscapes – some of them look very much like the European Alps.

The area around Lake Issyk Kul is enjoying increasing popularity: a regional attraction in the summer months, it is also increasingly appearing in the travel journals of foreign lovers of wide open spaces. And thanks to skiing, Kyrgyzstan also wants to attract these tourists in winter. The first objective is to “create a local clientele”, new winter sports enthusiasts from Kyrgyzstan or neighboring Kazakhstan, explains Pascal de Thiersant.

But the future ski area will also probably attract a clientele from further afield, notably Russian, Chinese and Indian. Two international airports, in Bishkek and Almaty, serve the area in five to six hours by car, and a train line should connect the country to China within a few years.

Economic development

At the risk of facing some criticism on the ecological level, however, as ski resorts are regularly criticized by certain associations. In response, the S3V claims that it would not have taken part in the project if it had not been “environmentally intelligent”, in its own words, specifying that it had refused other proposals in Vietnam or Saudi Arabia that did not respect this criterion. The choice of the Jyrgalan site, the place where the first of the three resorts included in the program will be built, will make it possible to trace “80% of the slopes without earthworks, with little tree cutting”, its director gives as an example.

To avoid excessive urbanisation, the French company also advised the Kyrgyz state to retain control of the land, in order to avoid a sprawl of chalets built by wealthy tourists and empty almost all year round, as can be seen in many European mountain ranges.

Kyrgyzstan, for its part, does not intend to miss the winter sports train. The country of 7.2 million inhabitants, a former Soviet republic with a fragile and undiversified economy, sees it as a good opportunity to boost national development. The construction of another large ski area has been launched in the North-West, this time led by a Russian company, and another project is being studied with Uzbekistan.