Visit Wengen Switzerland

A recent article in the Financial Times about changes in Wengen including the new Grand Hotel Belvedere.

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It’s a Thursday night in late January, and Wengen’s Downhill Only Club (DHO) isjust about standing room only. There must be 70 people, many of them silver-haired, packed into the red-carpeted clubhouse with its trophy cabinets and wall-mounted wooden skis, up some steps by the railway station. Members fromWengen’s even older curling club are this evening’s guests of honour, but much ofthe buzz is about the upcoming celebrations of the DHO’s centenary.

This eccentric ski-racing community, now with about 1,200 members, was hastilyfounded in February 1925 for a race against the Kandahar Club, based in nearbyMürren. The name is a reference to the cog railway that still runs up the mountaintoday, which had been built in 1893 and meant that — in the days before ski lifts —Wengen’s pioneering skiers had the unusual advantage of not having to walk upbefore they could ski down.

I’m ushered to one of the few remaining seats for a beer with Norman Freund, aspry 94 years old and still just about skiing strong. He’s hoping his troublesomelower back might hold up to the challenge of the McMillan Cup the following week.Just one of the many races organised by the DHO, it involves everyone setting offat the same time. “Let’s just say, I’m hopeful of winning theover-nineties category,” he notes drily.

It is the most old-school of ski resorts — but does the arrival of the first five-star hotel herald big changes for little Wengen?

A senior manager at IBM in a past life, Freund has been coming to Wengen everyyear since 1961, and has been a DHO member for 63 years. His grandchildrenlearnt to ski on Wengen’s gentle beginner slopes and now race with the club, just ashis fifty-something son and daughter did. “In many ways, not much has changed,”he says. “Maybe it’s because you have to get the train up here, but it’s held on to itsspirit.”

The train remains central to Wengen —other than walking, it is the only way toget from Lauterbrunnen, down on thevalley floor, up to the village, which sitson a sunny flank of the mountainside at1,275 metres. Home to about 1,300residents, it is dotted with ornate,pastel-fronted belle époque hotels, manyof them peering over the steep-sidedLauterbrunnen Valley (a place said tohave inspired JRR Tolkien’s Rivendell).An unassuming Alpine farmingcommunity until the arrival of therailway, it was up there with Gstaad and St Moritz among Switzerland’s mostglamorous destinations in the early 20th century, before slowly being overtaken bylarger and more accessible resorts.

With the winter sun shining the following morning, I collect my snowboard andtake the little green-and-mustard Wengernalpbahn upwards on the next stage of itsjourney. The world’s longest continuous rack and pinion railway, it climbs toKleine Scheidegg, a pass at 2,060 metres, before descending the far side, runningall the way down to the busy tourist town of Grindelwald. A branch line, theJungfraubahn, starts from Kleine Scheidegg and runs still higher, climbing throughtunnels within the Eiger to Europe’s highest station, at the Jungfraujoch, a 3,463-metre-high saddle between the peaks of the Jungfrau and Mönch.

I crane my neck up towards them as I get off the train at Kleine Scheidegg, the hubof a ski area offering more than 200km of pistes. From the station, it’s less than a50-metre walk to the Lauberhorn chairlift, at the top of which there’s a choice ofgrin-inducing red and black runs. One passes close to the start hut of theLauberhorn race — the oldest and still the longest World Cup downhill, which hasbeen causing jelly-legged wipeouts in the stretch beyond Wengen since 1930.

I take a more modest route, meandering back down to Kleine Scheidegg, where Ifind myself outside the Bellevue des Alpes, a hotel built in 1840, with a frontageframed by the Eiger that Wes Anderson could scarcely have dreamt up. I stayedthere on a previous visit and found a borderline austere place of soft jazz andcreaking floorboards, where phones were discouraged as waiters in white jacketsserved a set menu including smoked eel and pork belly to a serious clientele inturtlenecks and jackets.

It felt happily like living in an Agatha Christie mystery, and yet the past seemed toweigh heavily, with owner Andreas von Almen describing “the rucksack of history”,having taken the place over from his aunt Heidi. As with so many Wengen hoteliers— including his brother Urs, who runs the Hotel Jungfrau Wengernalp down thehill — there was a sense of responsibility to a more romantic past, including the1930s glory days, when there was an ice rink out front and Tatler would send acorrespondent for the season.

This winter, though, there is change in the air. After snowboarding down toWengen, I arrive at the Grand Hotel Belvedere, which opened in December in a six-storey sherbet-lemon building, officially becoming the first five-star hotel in thevillage (others have claimed the distinction in the past, but not since the Swiss starrating system was introduced in 1979).

Formerly the family-run Hotel Wengener Hof, it has undergone a major renovationat the hands of Geneva design firm Complete Works — the sweeping views over thevalley remain, but the patterned carpets and floral drape curtains have beenreplaced by crisp larch fittings, moss green upholstery and artfully mismatchedblack-and-white Alpine photographs. It’s owned by the ambitious French hotelgroup Beaumier, which has been modishly rebranding hotels across the FrenchAlps, Ibiza, Provence and the Côte d’Azur.

In fact, the 36-room property is just the start of Beaumier’s investment in Wengen.In May, the brand will open an even more striking second section of the hotel justup the hill, with 54 rooms in the former Grand Hotel Belvedere itself — an artnouveau fairytale of a building that first opened in 1912. The team have restoredthe frescoes and intricately wood-carved columns of the lobby, but also added asustainable wood pellet heating system and an adjoining minimalist concrete spawith indoor-outdoor baths, a relative rarity in the Swiss Alps. Beaumier has alsobought the 70-room Hotel Silberhorn by the railway station, previously owned bythe Zinnert family that operated the Belvedere and Wengener Hof, and plans torenovate in the coming years.

At the old Wengener Hof, I have dinner at the airy Waldrand restaurant withLorenz Maurer, the general manager who, with his thick glasses and shoulder-length hair, has the air of a Shoreditch creative director. The white tablecloths andold chandeliers are gone, replaced by pale wood and angular, iceberg-shapedlights. “Wengen is a sleeping beauty, even to the Swiss,” says Maurer. “We respectits soul, but it was crying out for something different for a new audience.”

As if on cue, a waiter (a snowboarding former yoga teacher from the Basquecountry) appears with a vegan fondue made with cashew nuts, chickpea and miso,served with new potatoes, pickled onion and green pepper. Afterwards, thetattooed young chef Will Gordon explains that, while he can still do a comfortingschnitzel or Black Angus burger, he wanted to reflect his own vegan leanings withdishes such as a meat-like mushroom shawarma and a moreish breaded misoaubergine dish.

Nothing on the menu is sourced from more than 100km away, with much of itforaged in the surrounding hills and forests — a rule that will also apply to theparquet-floored Brasserie Belvedere up the hill, where Swiss caviar and Bernesebeef will feature on a modern fine-dining menu.

Maurer and Gordon aren’t alone in bringing new ideas to Wengen. Next door is thepowder-blue Palace hotel, an imposing 420-bed grande dame that was once ownedby Club Med but has been mostly closed since 2009, leading to inevitablereferences to The Shining. Late last year it was finally acquired by a newly formed company, which plans to renovate and relaunch it.

A little further out, there’s a £75mn plan to build the W5 Luxury Suite Hotel, anapartment-hotel around a vast wellness area, which was recently the subject of afiery debate among locals in the village cinema.

When I meet Wengen’s tourist chief Rolf Wegmüller, he says he’s never seen moreflux in the region. While some of this might be down to a reappreciation ofnostalgic design, he says that the main factor is rising demand. Especially in thesummer season, which recently overtook winter for visitor numbers, marketingcampaigns and influencer posts have helped sell the picture-postcard Jungfrauregion, particularly to American and Asian tourists. Covid helped the Swiss torediscover holidaying in their homeland, while a trend for “coolcations” hasincreased the appeal of the Alps generally.

“In Wengen, we’re fully booked from May to August, and almost half the visitorsare now Americans, who tend to want a certain level of luxury,” says Wegmüller,contrasting them with winter’s predominantly British and Swiss visitors.

There are some obvious tensions between past and future. While the long-timehoteliers I speak to welcome the Grand Hotel Belvedere, there are local concernsthat quaint, family-friendly Wengen isn’t set up to cater to more demanding guests,with its relative dearth of smart shops and nightlife. People are quick to tell me thatWengen is “not Gstaad” — meaning, as Wegmüller puts it, “If you have a fur coatand a fancy car, you leave them in the car park at Lauterbrunnen.”

The regional rise of mass tourism is a bigger problem, up there with climate changeas a cause of angst. Andreas von Almen at the Bellevue des Alpes is among the localhoteliers fiercely opposed to the “selfie-and-go” tourists who take the train up tothe Jungfraujoch but tend not to linger — or spend — in local hotels andrestaurants.

But at least in the genteel bubble of Wengen, mass tourism still feels a long way off.One evening, I’m welcomed with crisps and Twiglets to St Bernard’s, the cosy littleAnglican church, built in 1927 near the nursery slopes. The chatty 77-year-oldchaplain, Roger Scoones, has been coming out here for 40 years for two-weekstints (he used to be the reverend at St Mary’s in Stockport) and has been acommitted DHO member all that time.

At the clubhouse the night before, he’d given a tearful speech while presenting awatercolour he’d painted of the club’s former chalet headquarters. Tonight, he’sfretting about his centenary service the following Sunday, having already torn up afirst draft of his sermon. “How can I cover a century of history and four decades ofpersonal stories, make room for Jesus — and still get the members back to the barin good time?”

I’m also anxious about doing justice to this most storied of places at a time in itshistory that feels tricky to define. So he helps me out with what sounds like aproverb, or maybe a prayer. “Let’s hope for some change here,” he says. “But, please God, not too much.”

Toby Skinner was a guest of the Grand Hotel Belvedere (beaumier.com) where doubles start from SFr350 (£309) per night, the Swiss public transport operatorTravel Switzerland (travelswitzerland.com) and Swiss International Air Lines (swiss.com). Equipment rental in Wengen was provided by Skiset (skisket.co.uk).For more information see the national and local tourist board websites:

myswitzerland.com

and

wengen.swiss