Champagne Climate Is Not Marketing
St. Moritz claims 322 sunny days per year and calls it a “champagne climate.” I was skeptical until I spent a January morning walking along the frozen lake under a sky that was so sharply blue it almost hurt to look at. The Engadine sits at 1,800 meters in a wide valley, and the altitude combined with the dry air from the east gives the light here a quality I haven’t found anywhere else — hard-edged, crystalline, casting shadows that look drawn with a fine pen.
The town itself is split into two parts: St. Moritz Dorf, the expensive bit up on the hill with the hotels and the boutiques, and St. Moritz Bad down by the lake, which is calmer and where most people who live here actually live. The gap between the two is instructive about how places like this work.
What Money Looks Like at 1,800 Meters
I’ll be honest about St. Moritz: it is expensive in a way that approaches parody. I paid twenty-six francs for a glass of wine at a hotel bar. I watched a man unload what appeared to be a full Louis Vuitton steamer trunk from a helicopter on the edge of town. There is a polo match played on the lake in February. These things coexist with perfectly good hiking trails that cost nothing and a regional train that costs very little.
The trick with St. Moritz is to treat the expensive parts as theatre you can observe without necessarily buying a seat. The Corviglia ski area above town is genuinely excellent — wide groomed runs, very reliable snow, and views east toward the Bernina massif that are worth the lift ticket even if you can’t ski.
The Engadine Beyond the Resort
What I hadn’t expected was how beautiful the surrounding valley is once you step past the immediate resort infrastructure. The Engadine is Romansh-speaking territory, and the villages along the Inn River — Sils, Silvaplana, Pontresina — have a different character entirely. The baroque tower houses painted with sgraffito patterns, the grey stone walls, the larches that turn fire-orange in October.
Lia and I rented e-bikes one September afternoon and rode along the lake from St. Moritz toward Maloja, passing through Silvaplana and Sils-Maria. The philosopher Nietzsche used to summer in Sils. You can visit his house. I stood in his small study and looked out at the same lake he looked at and thought about how long a view can outlast a person.
Ice and Tradition
In February, St. Moritz hosts the White Turf horse races on the frozen lake — a tradition since 1907. Horses race on snow, the crowd wraps in blankets, and there’s a bizarre, antiquated glamour to the whole thing that feels like it shouldn’t still exist in the twenty-first century but does. I found it genuinely wonderful.
The Cresta Run, a natural ice toboggan track, also operates from St. Moritz each winter. Non-members can ride it on limited days. I went fast enough to be frightened in a way I hadn’t been since childhood, which seems like a sufficient reason to do something.
When to go: January and February for snow sports and the full winter theatre — White Turf, Cresta Run, polo on ice. September and October for the most beautiful hiking, Engadine larches in peak color, and thin crowds. July is pleasant but busy. Avoid the period between mid-April and mid-June: slushy, half the things closed, the valley at its least photogenic.