Since its origins, Orelle has always been a small mountain village. Gathered in ten hamlets, the villagers lived of agriculture and breeding, of the sale of the wood cuts as well as of the exploitation of the mines of slate stones and minerals disseminated on both mountainsides of Orelle.
The community was primarily made up of peasants and craftsmen. The location of the old mills, the forges and other tanneries testifies still today to this diversity which made possible to generations of Orellins to work and live in the country without that an emigration towards less austere grounds being necessary .

Space exiguous and sloping determined the lie of the parcels. The superposition in terraces allowed a saving in space in spite of the retaining walls which have to be raised each year. Orelle was rich in vineyards and it is even said that it's in Orelle that it was produced the "first" wine of France... coming from Italy !

It's in 1893 that the construction of the electrochemical factory of Prémont disrupt the habits: become workers-peasants, the life of the inhabitants is from now on rhythmed by the hooter of the factory. But after the shift work another day starts, in the fields and the cattle sheds.

The construction of the Bissorte's dam brought another important change for the village. This gigantic and majestic work is carried out between 1931 and 1935, at an altitude of 2000 meters. Thanks to a storage basin of 40 million cubic meters and to a forced water pipe of more than one thousand meters of height, the energy created is distributed and exported.
Towards the end of the Sixties, the wages of workman became sufficient to provid for own family without having still to work with the pastoral activity. Agriculture ceased so being a fully economic activity. The decline of the factory, at the beginning of the Seventies, generated a rapid demographic drops which touches its historical minimum in 1991 when the factory closes definitively down.

It is only in 1996, thanks to the construction of the gondola to Val-Thorens that the demographic curve starts to grown and that the villages are renovated and are increasing again. The commune and its inhabitants turn then resolutely to a tourist orientation of development, always in the respect of nature and traditions.