🇨🇭 Switzerland · Valais and the south
St. Moritz is a name that sounds like luxury, snow and the jet set, and with reason: this Upper Engadine village, in the Swiss canton of the Grisons, is literally the cradle of winter tourism. Here, in 1864, the hotelier Johannes Badrutt made a bet that changed the history of tourism: he convinced some English guests that the alpine winter, far from being grey and hostile, could be bright and sunny. He won the bet and, with it, invented an industry. Since then, St. Moritz has been a byword for high-end winter holidays, with two Winter Olympic Games behind it (1928 and 1948) and one of the most exclusive international clienteles on the planet.
But St. Moritz is much more than five-star hotels and watch boutiques. It sits in the Engadine, one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Switzerland: a high valley of intense light, dotted with lakes, surrounded by snowy peaks and glaciers, with villages whose houses are decorated with sgraffito work (the 'sgraffiti' typical of the region). In winter, the frozen lake becomes an incredible stage: horse races are run on the ice (the White Turf), snow polo is played, and the legendary and dangerous Cresta Run, the most famous natural skeleton track in the world, operates. In summer, those same landscapes open up to hiking, cycling and the panoramic railway.
This guide covers St. Moritz with a practical, honest eye: what to see and do in the village and its surroundings, how to go up the Piz Nair, how to take the legendary Bernina Express to Italy on a line declared a World Heritage Site, how much things really cost (a lot: it is one of the most expensive destinations in the world) and how to make the most of the Swiss Travel Pass. St. Moritz is exclusive, yes, but the beauty of the Engadine and its mountain trains are within reach of any traveller who knows how to move around.
The history of St. Moritz goes back far earlier than skiing. Its mineral springs, extremely rich in carbon dioxide, were already drawing people in the Bronze Age, more than 3.000 years ago: offerings from the period were found at the spring. For centuries it was a summer spa where people came to 'take the waters', under the patronage of Saint Maurice (Mauritius), which is where its name comes from. Everything changed in 1864, when the hotelier Johannes Badrutt bet some English clients that they would enjoy the Engadine winter: he won the bet and, without meaning to, invented winter tourism. St. Moritz became the fashionable destination of the Belle Époque, host of two Winter Olympic Games (1928 and 1948) and a refuge for the international jet set. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The alpine and Mediterranean south of Switzerland: the Rhône valley and the bishopric of Sion, the Matterhorn of Zermatt conquered in 1865, Italian Ticino that was a subject land of the Confederation, and the Romansh Engadine where St. Moritz invented winter tourism.
Read the history of Valais and the south →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there were skis, luxury hotels or the jet set, St. Moritz was already a place people made pilgrimages to for one very specific reason: its mineral springs. At the bottom of the St. Moritz spring, archaeologists found votive offerings, swords and pins from the Bronze Age, more than 3.000 years old, proof that prehistoric peoples — and later the Celts — already knew and revered these waters. The St. Moritz springs are among the richest in carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) in Europe, and their effervescent, iron-rich taste made them famous as healing waters.
For centuries, the Engadine was a high, remote valley in the Grisons, inhabited by communities speaking Romansh, a Latin-derived language that still survives in the region and is Switzerland's fourth official language. The name of the place comes from Saint Maurice (Sanctus Mauritius, San Murezzan in Romansh), the saint to whom the local church was dedicated. The fame of the waters kept growing: in 1535, the famous physician and alchemist Paracelsus visited the spring and praised its properties in writing, which drew the attention of the European nobility.
From then on, St. Moritz established itself as a summer spa to which the aristocracy came to 'take the waters'. In 1832 the first guesthouse was built beside the spring, and by the mid-19th century it could already accommodate hundreds of visitors. But it was still strictly a summer destination: as soon as the cold arrived, the guests left and the valley closed in on itself, white and silent, for long winter months. Nobody imagined then that precisely that winter, seen as an obstacle, would become the village's greatest asset.
The founding moment of modern St. Moritz has a date, a name and the shape of a bet. The protagonist was Johannes Badrutt, a visionary hotelier who in 1856 had rented a modest guesthouse in the village (the Pension Faller, the seed of the future Kulm Hotel) and bought it shortly afterwards, turning it into the first hotel in St. Moritz. Badrutt was convinced of something his contemporaries thought absurd: that the Engadine winter, with its clear sky, its intense sun and its dry snow, was not a torment but a pleasure, far sunnier and brighter than the grey, damp winters of northern Europe.
In the autumn of 1864, determined to prove it, he made a group of his English clients a memorable proposal. He told them, more or less: 'Come back to St. Moritz in winter. If you do not enjoy it, if you find the cold unbearable, I will pay for your journey from London and back myself'. It was a bet in every sense. The English took up the challenge and arrived at Christmas, expecting to find a frozen wasteland. Instead they found radiant sunny days, dry air and a dazzling landscape. They stayed on delighted until Easter, tanned and happy, and went back to England to tell the tale.
That bet, won hands down by Badrutt, is usually considered the official birth of winter tourism in the Alps. Word spread, and within a few years St. Moritz was full of guests coming precisely in the cold season. Badrutt kept innovating: in 1878 he installed the first electric light in Switzerland in the restaurant of his Kulm Hotel, a technological luxury that astonished his clientele. The summer spa village had reinvented itself as the capital of winter, and it would never stop being so.
With the first winter tourists came the urge to do something with all that snow and ice. In the last decades of the 19th century, St. Moritz became the laboratory where much of the winter sport we know today was invented or perfected. The English guests, with their love of clubs and competitions, were the main driving force.
In the winter of 1884-1885, the Cresta Run was built between St. Moritz and the neighbouring village of Celerina: a natural ice chute down which the boldest threw themselves face down and head first on a small sled. That track, built by hand every winter and still running, is the cradle of skeleton, and it remains the only natural track for the sport in the world, with its eccentric British club air and its tradition (for more than a century, controversially, it admitted only male riders). Shortly afterwards, on 1 January 1904, the first bobsleigh track opened in St. Moritz, the Olympia Bob Run, which is also the only natural bob track on the planet still in use.
To these were added figure skating, curling, ice hockey, horse racing on the frozen lake (the White Turf, from 1907) and the first steps of alpine skiing. St. Moritz thus earned, with every right, the title of cradle of winter sports, a legacy it celebrates to this day with unique events using its frozen lake as a stage. The combination of luxury hotel infrastructure and these pioneering competitions put it at the centre of the world sporting map.
St. Moritz's sporting prestige culminated in the greatest of honours: the Winter Olympic Games. The Engadine village hosted them not once but twice. The first were the 1928 Games, held from 11 to 19 February, with 25 nations and more than 460 athletes; they were Games marked by the extreme high-mountain weather, with temperatures swinging wildly and affecting some events. Twenty years later, in 1948, St. Moritz was an Olympic host again, from 30 January to 8 February. Those were historic Games for another reason: they were the first after the Second World War, following twelve years without Olympic competition, and so they are remembered as the 'Games of renewal'. Switzerland, neutral during the conflict, offered an intact and peaceful setting to bring world sport back together.
With two Olympics behind it, St. Moritz became one of the very few places in the world to host the Winter Games twice. That double Olympic stamp cemented its international image and its brand, which the village guards jealously (the name 'St. Moritz' and its sun logo have even been registered as a trademark for more than a century).
Through the 20th century, St. Moritz completed its transformation into the jet set destination. Its grand hotels — Badrutt's Palace, the Kulm, the Carlton, the Suvretta House — filled with aristocrats, tycoons, film stars and royalty who made the village their winter appointment. The Via Serlas, its main street, became one of the most expensive in the world, with boutiques of the great luxury brands and watch shops. St. Moritz came to mean exclusivity, glamour and stratospheric prices, one of the most expensive places on the planet.
Today's St. Moritz still lives off that double inheritance: the spa of miraculous waters and the village that invented winter tourism. It is an avowedly luxury destination, with a winter season that draws the international elite to ski at Corviglia and Corvatsch and to enjoy the unique events on the frozen lake — the White Turf, snow polo, ice cricket, the Cresta Run — all of them making use of that rarity, an alpine lake that bears the weight of horses, stands and crowds.
But St. Moritz has also learned to value its other great season, summer, when the Upper Engadine unfolds one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Switzerland: the chain of lakes at Silvaplana and Sils, European meccas of windsurfing and kitesurfing thanks to the Maloja wind; the larch woods that turn gold in autumn; and an immense network of trails and cycle paths among glaciers and peaks. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche walked these valleys in search of inspiration, spending his summers in nearby Sils Maria.
And then there are the trains. St. Moritz is a hub for two of the most famous rail journeys in the world, both run by the Grisons railway (Rhätische Bahn) and the Swiss railways: it is the terminus of the Glacier Express, which links it with Zermatt in eight hours of unbroken scenery, and the starting point of the Bernina Express to Tirano, in Italy, on the Albula/Bernina line, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. Those trains, which cross spiral viaducts and glacier passes at more than 2.200 metres with no rack, are today one of the place's great draws and put the beauty of the Engadine within reach of any traveller, not just the jet set. St. Moritz, in short, is still what it was: a small mountain village with an enormous history, the eternal capital of the alpine winter.