Switzerland’s oldest mountain inn where winter sports are banned

Near the top of the Grimsel Pass, a silvery granite chalet with apple-red shutters draws a steady stream of photographers. The Grimsel Hospiz, first documented in 1142 and possibly founded by the Order of Saint Lazarus or the Augustinian monastery of Interlaken, sits at 2,000 metres with its foundations deep in snow.

Over the centuries it has housed monks, shepherds, travellers and soldiers, been ravaged by fire and buried by an avalanche, and now stands surrounded on three sides by plunging ravines and the frozen Grimselsee, which thaws to turquoise ice floes in spring. Reaching the inn is a journey through the infrastructure that powers the mountains: a PostBus from Innertkirchen Kraftwerk, a high-security shutter into an underground hydropower station, a minibus through a road blasted into granite and a cable car that rises above the Spitallamm Dam, the 113-metre arch that helps store glacier meltwater.

Switzerland, Grimsel Pass

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