'Ghost resorts'

As the Alps warm and the skiers melt away, what is left behind?

- Phoebe Weston

When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter.

Maps of the pistes were left stacked; the rota pinned to the wall.

Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table. The resort in the southern French Alps had been open for 85 years, one of the oldest in the country. Today, it is one of scores abandoned across France - part of a new landscape of "ghost stations".

More than 186 are permanently shut already, raising questions about how we leave mountains - among Europe's last wild spaces - once the lifts stop running. As global heating pushes the snow line higher across the Alps, thousands of structures are being left to rot - some of them breaking down and contaminating the earth, driving debate about whether to let nature reclaim the mountains.

Snowfall at Céüze started becoming unreliable in the 1990s.

To be financially viable, the resort needed to be open for at least three months. In that last winter, it only managed a month and a half. For the two years before that it had not been able to operate at all.

Opening the resort each season cost the local authority as much as €450,000 (£390,000). As the season got shorter, the numbers no longer added up. To avoid a spiral of debt, the decision was made to close.

"It was costing us more to keep it open than to keep it closed for the season," says Michel Ricou-Charles, president of the Buëch-Dévoluy community council, which oversees the site. "We looked into using artificial snow, but realised that would delay the inevitable," he says.

It was seven years before the trucks and helicopters came in to begin removing the pylons. Still, the local community grieved for the small, family-oriented resort. As demolitions began, they came to take nuts, bolts and washers as mementoes of what they had lost.