Valais
Switzerland at its most dramatic.
Valais is the region that stops you mid-sentence. You're talking, walking, looking at something else — and then you turn a corner and there's the Matterhorn, or a valley that drops away so sharply it seems like the world has simply ended at its edge. This is Switzerland stripped down to its essentials: rock, ice, light, and a way of living in high places that hasn't changed all that much in a hundred years. It's worth the journey to get here. And it's worth staying longer than you planned.
Destinations in Valais
Slow travel in Valais
The temptation in Valais is to do everything at altitude — and there's nothing wrong with that. The views from Gornergrat, Zinalrothorn, and the Aletsch glacier are among the finest things Europe has to offer. But slow travel in Valais happens in the valleys too: in the wine villages of the Rhône between Sion and Sierre, where the terraced vineyards climb impossibly steep hillsides and the local Fendant is drunk cold and young and perfect with a plate of raclette. In the thermal baths at Leukerbad, where you can sit in outdoor pools with snowfields overhead and feel the tension of the journey leave your shoulders entirely. In the old town of Sion with its two ancient fortresses on twin hills above the valley — a place most visitors simply drive through on the way to Zermatt. Give the valley as much time as the mountains. They earn each other.