Venice in February — the City the Photographers Forget

It is hard to explain the Engadine to anyone who has not climbed the last twenty minutes of railway out of the Albula tunnel and seen, suddenly and without ceremony, the valley open up like a held breath. We came in late April, when the larches had not yet turned — the locals had warned us we were a fortnight early — and stayed until the second week of May, by which time the trees had done the thing they do once a year and the trains had begun, again, to thin out.

Three weeks is a long time to spend in one valley. It is also, we discovered, exactly the right amount of time. Two would have been hurried; four would have been indulgent. In three you learn the name of the woman at the bakery in Sils, you find a bench in the larch wood you return to most days, and you stop, slowly, looking at the train timetable.

This is the third in our occasional series, The Long Walk ^[1]. The premise is simple: a writer takes themselves somewhere by train, walks every day, eats two proper meals, sleeps eight hours, and writes down the rest. There is no itinerary arranged in advance. We pay for everything. No hotel is told we are coming.

We left London on a Tuesday morning and were in Sils-Maria by Wednesday afternoon — twenty-eight hours door to door, including a long lunch in Zürich. The same trip by air, with a transfer to St. Moritz, would have been a notional six hours and a real ten by the time you'd finished with security at Heathrow. The arithmetic, once you do it honestly, favours the train almost every time.

It also favours one's joints. My husband, who is seventy-three, has not flown without complaint in five years. He stepped off the Bernina Express in the same condition in which he had boarded it, which is to say, ready to walk to the hotel.

Fig. 02 — Sils-Maria, viewed from the path above the Hotel Margna. The valley narrows here before opening, again, towards Silvaplana.46.43°N · 9.76°E

The Swiss Travel Pass, for which we paid CHF 419 each (the over-65 rate), covered every train, postal bus and cable car for the duration. It also got us into thirty-four museums we did not visit, and onto two boats we did. If you intend to leave your hotel even three times in a week, the pass pays for itself. If you intend to stay in your hotel, you ought to consider whether you have chosen the right hotel.

The Engadine is, geographically speaking, a string of four lakes stitched together by a thin river and a thinner railway. From west to east: Sils, Silvaplana, Champfèr, St. Moritz. The first is the largest and quietest; the last is the smallest and busiest, which tells you something about how Switzerland has organised itself.

Walking the perimeter of Lake Sils takes a slow person about three hours ^[2]. We did it twice. The path is flat, gravelled, and benched at sensible intervals — perhaps every two hundred metres, by my count. There are toilets at the two villages along the way and an excellent café at Isola, halfway round, that does an open-faced ham sandwich and a small jug of coffee for CHF 14.

Silvaplana, the next lake east, has the kite-surfers. We sat at the lido and watched them for an afternoon. There is a particular pleasure in being old enough to enjoy other people doing the strenuous thing.

The larch (Lärche, in German; melèze, in the Romansh of the valley) is the only conifer in Europe that drops its needles in winter. In autumn it turns the colour of a marigold; in spring it returns first as a faint green haze and then, almost overnight, as a wood. We were there for the haze. It is a very small thing to travel for, and quite worth it.

We walked, on average, eleven kilometres a day ^[3]. Most days were two walks — one before lunch, one in the long afternoon. We learned, gradually, to start later. The light in the upper Engadine is good from about ten in the morning. Before that, the valley is in the shadow of its own mountains, and the cold settles in the lungs.

Fig. 03 — Larch wood above Maloja, May 2. The trees, the locals told us, were two weeks behind schedule. They returned, all at once, on the 4th.46.40°N · 9.69°E

We met, on these walks, a particular kind of fellow walker — almost all of them between sixty and eighty, almost all of them carrying a single small pack, almost all of them German or Dutch. They walked at the pace of a slow horse. They greeted us in the German of the upper valley, which is not quite the German of anywhere else. They did not, generally, want to talk; they wanted, like us, to be quiet outdoors.

On day eleven we took the train two stops east to St. Moritz Bad, the spa quarter of the larger town, and spent an afternoon at the Ovaverva. The pool complex is municipal, which is to say, civic, which is to say, cheap and unfussy and entirely correct. CHF 24 for three hours; we stayed four, and no-one minded.

The water of St. Moritz has been bottled, drunk and bathed in since at least the Bronze Age ^[4]. It contains iron, which gives it a faint rust colour and a particular smell. After half an hour in it, the smell goes away, and so does the soreness in the small joints.

Fig. 04 — The mineral pool at Ovaverva, St. Moritz Bad. Open until 22:00; quietest after eight.46.49°N · 9.83°E

We returned twice more — once in Pontresina, once in the small spa at our hotel in Sils. Each time the routine was the same; each time it worked. I am not a doctor and will not claim that thermal water cures anything. I will claim that it makes the next morning's walk easier, and that this is reason enough.

We slept under three roofs in three weeks: the Waldhaus at Sils, the Nira Alpina at Silvaplana, and the Saratz at Pontresina. Full reviews follow in the sidebar at the foot of this piece; here, briefly, the headline. The Waldhaus was the best of them — not because the rooms were the most modern (they were the least), but because the building runs on a kind of nineteenth-century patience that suits a long stay. The chef, for what it is worth, still presses the butter by hand, in a wooden mould shaped like a fir cone.

The breakdown above is complete. We took two return trains, we stayed twenty-one nights, we ate forty meals out and made twelve at the hotels' breakfast buffets. We bought a wool hat and three books and a postcard for our niece. The total comes to CHF 10,119, which is to say, about £8,950, or about $11,300, depending on the day's rates.

For comparison: a ten-day Caribbean cruise leaving Southampton the same week, with a balcony cabin for two, was advertised at £9,400 plus flights. The trains and larch came in cheaper, and lasted twice as long.

The Engadine, in late April and early May, is one of the small great places left in Europe — small, because the valley is twenty miles long and you can walk the meaningful part of it in a fortnight; great, because the air, the water, the trees, the trains and the bakeries are all, in their separate ways, in working order.

We will go back, almost certainly, in late September. The larches in October are reported to be the colour of a particular kind of marmalade, and we should like to see them.

— Margaret Ellis, writing from Pontresina, May 6, 2026.