Allevard Castle stood above the town on a hill surrounded by a wall 60 toises long and described: "and water flowed from the Breyda and partly from the Sabaudie".

It also noted "quaddam hospitium seu fortalicium sum et domum fortem que situatur infra villam de alarvardo" in 1367 about an ancient tower and fortified house belonging to Guillaume Barral which connected the ditches of the city in 1393[9] In the Middle Ages Allevard was the seat of a lordship.

The survey of 1339 reported the existence of a large house in a place called the "Bâtie d'Arvillard": "Castrum Bastide alti villaris" (ADI B 4443, folio 14).

The survey states: "Dictum autem castrum situatum est in quodam altissimo molare valde eminente et deffensabile"(the castle is located on a very high mound with a great height and easy to defend).

The streets are unpaved, narrow, and winding with mud kept wet with the dampness which favoured epidemics and the emergence or persistence of goiter" (Bouffier 1846).

Paulin de Barral 17 (1745–1822), his grandson, was the last lord of Allevard and of Jaligny in Bourbonnais who sold at a loss his castle and his factories in 1817 to A.B.

A study of the remains indicated that the Allevard community had, between 1643 and 1727, a total of 76 works on the "Bredal" stream: 3 blast furnaces, 21 Trip hammers, 36 flour mills, 2 hemp beaters, 6 presses, 6 water-powered saws, 1 nail factory, and 1 fuller's earth plant.

For many years Allevard remained an industrial site of great importance under as the blacksmith lords of the Barral family who constantly sought to innovate with the advice of the engineer Binelli and Sir Pierre Clement Grignon, collaborator in the Encyclopédie of Diderot.

Shortly before the Revolution a major project to relocate the Royal Naval cannon foundry of Saint-Gervais in the valley of the Isere to Allevard was considered.

Only the relative weakness in the supply of charcoal put off the government – there needed to be 36,000 loads of coal per year when all the Allevard and nearby Gresivaudan communities could provide was at most 15,000.

The plant therefore became idle under the casual management of Paulin Barral, then of Messrs Champel – who received the Duchess of Berry in Allevard in 1829, then Giroud who were bankers and were soon bankrupted.

[14] It was also at Allevard that in 1859 some of the first armourplating for the frigate La Gloire were produced together with the companies Petetin de Saint Chamond and Laubenière of Rouen.

After the abandonment of cast iron from charcoal the forges converted to the Siemens process to manufacture steel, conserving for Allevard at the turn of the century: "their name and their place in the metallurgic world, to the satisfaction our dauphinois pride and for the benefit of our courageous working population" (Chabrand).

At this time Allevard also had a silk factory employing a large female workforce - an establishment led by the Izoard family who were related to Aimé Bouchayer an industrialist and banker from Grenoble who quickly developed a major centre of tourism based on hydrotherapy.

Liberation marked the renewal of machinery (10,000 tons / year of rolled products) and a steady influx of immigrant workers on three industrial sites: The Gorge of Allevard - Champ Sappey, Saint-Pierre-d'Allevard, and Le Cheylas.

Nowadays, the development of the silicon industry and its derivatives near Grenoble has led to a growth of urbanism which imposes by its sprawl major changes in the landscape of the commune with other parts affected by agricultural abandonment and extensions of the forest.

Very early on famous people resided in Allevard to take the waters (for drinking or inhaling in common rooms) such as Alphonse Daudet (who took up three chapters of his novel, Numa Roumestan),[16] Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Frédéric Ozanam, Henri d'Orléans, Duke of Aumale (son of Louis-Philippe from the family of Lucien Bonaparte and Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar during his exile in France).

These include, among others, the actors Paul Mounet and Jean Mounet-Sully, the brothers Coquelin the elder and the younger, Félia Litvinne, Germaine Lubin, Georgette Leblanc; then later Jeanne Aubert, Cécile Sorel, and Damia who were singers; politicians such as Eugène Chevandier de Valdrôme, Eugène Rouher, Charles Floquet, Édouard Herriot, Georges Picot (who died in 1909 at Allevard), Gustave Hervé, Alexandre Zévaès, Auguste Burdeau, and Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner in 1897 in the middle of the Dreyfus affair.

There were also many other notable people: clerics such as Father Della Chiesa - the future Pope Benedict XV, Monseigneur Félix Dupanloup (Bishop of Orléans), the Genevan pastor Theodore Claparede, and the chief rabbi of France Isaïe Schwartz; preachers such as Joseph Gratry of the French Academy, and Father Jean-Léon Le Prevost; diplomats such as Camille Barrere, Count Vladimir Lamsdorf, Prince Pierre Wolkonsky, Count Zichy, and Prince Ypsilanti, the Roumanian mountaineer Prince Alexandre Bibesco; musicians such as Jules Massenet and Charles Lamoureux; photographers such as Nadar and the Lumière brothers; poets such as Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Patrice de La Tour du Pin; musicologists such as Paul-Marie Masson and Émile Vuillermoz; painters such as Hippolyte Flandrin and Kees van Dongen; the novelists Germaine Acremant and Thyde Monnier; French academicians such as Victor de Laprade and René de La Croix de Castries; professors of medicine Louis Landouzy and Maxime Laignel-Lavastine; industrialists and financiers such as Pierre Dreyfus, Edward Molyneux, and Calouste Gulbenkian; Swiss bankers Pictet and Mornay; the chemist Joseph Bienaimé Caventou; the feminist Arria Ly who worked at the local newspaper, Chronicle of Allevard-les-Bains led by Dr. Boel in 1903,[18] Dr. Edmond Locard (a nephew of Dr. Niepce the Director of the Spa); the cartoonist Jacques Faizant; the architect Henri Révoil; President Ferhat Abbas, the family of President Habib Bourguiba, and Admiral Muselier are among other celebrities who have been regulars of the spa.

[citation needed] Finally, it was in 1994 that a new spa building opened for the care and cure of rheumatology which revived the first indications in 1838 by Dr. Laurent Chataing, the first inspector of waters.

Finally Collet d'Allevard offers one of the largest night ski areas in Europe covering the Malatrait and Fontaineterre sectors.

Held on the nearest Thursday to 29 September, the date is linked to that of the descent from alpine pastures giving rise to a large festival day where the cows were decorated with leaves, wild flowers, and branches.