Posh ski resorts and castles tower above winding cobblestone streets dating back to medieval times in this small valley community bidding for the 2002 Winter Games.
There are also American-style fast-food restaurants, including a McDonald's by the train station, and the busiest place in town is the sprawling Co-Op City store, which sells potted cactus alongside food and clothing.The 25,000 residents of Sion play host to nearly ten times that many tourists annually. Most visitors to the two hilltop castles or the ancient village below are on their way somewhere else, usually the mountains.
They may spend a few hours climbing to the castles and window-shopping in the quaint old section of town but then head on to Crans Montana, the Four Valleys or even Zermatt, home of the famed Matterhorn, to ski or hike.
Only a handful of the tens of thousands of hotel rooms in the Valais canton, as this region is known, are even located in Sion, and those need to be modernized. Some, for example, still have rotary dial telephones.
The local population is said to double during the daytime here in the canton capital, when bank clerks, insurance agents, government workers, boisterous students and assemblers of famous Swatch watches fill the streets.
Come nightfall, though, even the locals have abandoned many of the cafes and bars. The shops close early, giving the streets an eerie, deserted feel by 7 p.m. on a Friday night.
Unemployment has risen from nearly zero to about 5 percent in recent years, blamed in part on a decline in travel by Europeans suffering the effects of a continental recession.
Sion Mayor Gilbert Debons, president of the bid committee, said showcasing the region in the Winter Games would help attract more visitors year-round and create new jobs.
"I hope the Olympic movement will give us an opening to the world, a better opening, especially for our young people," Debons said. "Sion is not well-known at this moment."
That is likely to change now that Sion is one of four cities still in the running for the 2002 Winter Games, along with Salt Lake City; Ostersund, Sweden; and Quebec, Canada.
Last week, in nearby Lausanne, a special panel of the International Olympic Committee selected the four finalists after reviewing a technical evaluation of bids submitted by nine cities worldwide.
The IOC will announce its choice for the 2002 Winter Games on June 16, at a meeting in Budapest, Hungary. Before that date, many of the 96 members of the IOC are expected to visit each of the four remaining candidate cities.
There was no organized celebration here after the final four were named, but there are some signs of support for the bid, endorsed by 61 percent of the voters in a referendum election last June.
Banners bearing the bid logo, a red star from the canton flag with a blue Matterhorn peak, flap above the street in the old section, where a small exhibit is tucked behind a historic cathedral.
A cafe owner, called over by a waitress to translate for an American reporter, speaks enthusiastically about the bid and even gives out "Sion 2002" stickers.
Unlike much of Switzerland, English is not widely spoken here. Area residents typically are fluent in both French and German and sometimes Italian, as are many Swiss.
Most of the several dozen people stopped on the street by an American reporter said, in French or German, that they could not speak English. "It is very difficult for strangers here," a young Italian-born store clerk said.
"Sion is a little village, but everybody here thinks it is a big village in their head," she said, struggling to translate from French to English. "Maybe it (the Olympics) is too big for Sion."
A 17-year-old student of economics, eager to try out his English, said he supported the bid. "People who come to Sion just pass through it," Daniel Bronnimann said, suggesting the Olympics will increase tourism.
Bronnimann said there has not been much discussion about the bid, which was launched just a year ago by community leaders. `Now that we are in the final four, it will be a topic," he said.
A piano tuner who has lived in Sion just seven months said he has not made up his mind about the bid yet. Yves Monnier said he isn't sure he believes bid committee promises that the environment won't be hurt by the Games.
"I would prefer to earn less money and to have a good environment than to have a little more money and have the Games. It's just common sense," Monnier said.
Bid officials are sensitive to how Sion is seen by the rest of Switzerland and the world. Some of the French-language newspapers in Switzerland have suggested Sion is not yet ready to host the Olympics and should wait until 2006.
Within Switzerland, the Valais region is perhaps best-known for its wines, harvested for centuries from terraced vineyards that wind high up the snow-covered mountain slopes.
A recent cartoon in Le Matin, French-speaking Switzerland's most popular morning newspaper, characterized Valaisans with a thick-necked man hoisting a glass of wine to toast Sion's bid.
The cartoon also shows "Les Mormons," represented by a thin, wide-eyed man clutching a paper marked, "Salt Lake City," an apparent reference to the misperception many have here that alcohol is not available in Utah.
"Of course we have questions about Mormons. It's something we don't know well here in Switzerland," Le Matin's Lausanne-based Olympic reporter, Fred Hetzel, said.
Other cartoons about Sion's bid show Valaisans with bulbous red noses, using the Olympic flame to prepare raclette, a native cheese dish similar to fondue.
Bid spokesman Lance Kelley, a local attorney, stopped short of describing Sion as provincial. But he said the area's residents have a special loyalty to the region that outsiders don't always understand.
"People from the Valais always stay together. We are very close to each other . . . . When the people of the Valais go out of their canton, you can always tell who they are," he said.
After centuries of struggling to farm swampy valleys and steep mountainsides, Kelley said, the region has settled into a way of life that is "calm and comfortable."
And fun. "A lot of people come to the Valais to drink and to have fun. It's not like Salt Lake City at all. If it really was bad (here), they wouldn't come back so often," Kelley said.
There are other concerns facing the bid besides image.
Sion fared well in the evaluation report, although several problems were cited, including the proposed site of the opening and closing ceremonies and the six-hour drive to the bobsled and luge competition in St. Moritz.
The bid committee wants to build a temporary stadium to seat 25,000 for the ceremonies in the saddle between the 700-year-old castles, the Chateau de Tourbillon and the Chateau de Valere.
The proposal has yet to be approved by the Swiss government because of historic concerns, and the IOC said the location - accessible by a somewhat steep climb along a narrow path - poses security and safety problems.
Bid officials don't intend to dwell on this, or any other concerns about Sion, with the IOC members who are scheduled to begin their visits to each of the four finalist cities on Feb. 6 in Sion.
In fact, the IOC members will divide their time between two luxurious ski resorts, Crans Montana, where fur-clad skiers browse Chanel and other pricey shops after a day on the slopes, and the quaint-but-chic town of Zermatt.