Aisha Tukur
While Switzerland is full of Alpine huts and hard-to-reach hotels, Alp Grüm is a mountain anomaly like no other.
“Happily, there are no roads. There is only nature. Sunrises. Sunsets. Stillness. Nothing more, ” Primo Semadeni, the 57-year-old manager of Alp Grüm hotel in Graubünden, told me as we stood overlooking a high-altitude pass covered in perpetual snow. The soundtrack was whispering wind, singing birds and rushing water as a river tumbled down the valley.
“Look around, we have mountains and glaciers and are far from everyday life. This is a challenge, but also our blessing.”
Hard-to-reach hotels and huts are a Swiss specialty, with many preserved as monuments to Alpine history. The Jungfrau Region, within the snow-ruffled reaches of the Bernese Alps, is for lofty shelters in the car-free villages of Mürren, Wengen and Kleine Scheidegg, where accommodation can only be accessed by ski lift, cable car or cogwheel train. These are places of meditation, where hikers wander and the mind slows.
Then there is an alphabet of striking refuges hidden in mountain eyries, from the Appenzell Alps to Zermatt. Great St Bernard Hospice in Valais is a remarkable example, requiring a continual push by snowshoe in winter, or a high-altitude access road, which only opens to traffic after the thaw.
But Alp Grüm, straddling a razor-edge ridge on the south side of the Bernina Pass at 2,091m, pushes such extremes to the limits. It is caught between languages, with the immediate north speaking Romansh and the valley below Italian. There is no road to it beneath Piz Bernina, the highest peak of the Eastern Alps. And the only way to get there year-round is to hike in for hours – not recommended in winter – or take the Rhaetian Railway that climbs high between the little towns of Pontresina and Poschiavo near the Italian border.
What’s more, the hotel’s identity is wholly drawn from the history of the rail company, and it doubles as train station, platform and waiting room. Between 20:00 and 08:00, however, the trains leave the rails and the hotel is cut off from the rest of Switzerland, left to exist in a bubble of its own.
Visiting the Alps can so often feel like stepping into a storybook, and that feeling is particularly strong in the Engadin valley, where the horizon is a lithograph of great mountains that crest like waves. I’ve been to the area many times – to measure my experience of Switzerland at its wildest against that of the pioneers of winter sports tourism – but this time I was in comfort, on board the Bernina Express and travelling south from Chur, the oldest town in Switzerland.
