Glacier
| Glacier | ||
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| State : |
 Switzerland
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| Canton : |
 Valais (VS)
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| District : | Goms | |
| Municipal municipality : | Obergoms | |
| Postal code : | 3999 | |
| Coordinates : | 670 836 / 157341 | |
| Height : | 1759 m above sea level M. | |
| Website: | www.oberwald.ch | |
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The Gletsch settlement belongs to the municipality of Obergoms VS in the Goms district of the canton of Valais in Switzerland . It essentially consists of the Hotel Glacier du Rhône (Rhone Glacier) and its outbuildings, a train station and a former petrol station. The Anglican Chapel, built in 1907/08, stands on the edge of the settlement. Hotelier Josef Seiler built it according to his own plans on behalf of the Anglican Church . From 1942 to the 1950s there was a hydroelectric power station in Gletsch .
Gletsch lies at an altitude of 1759 m below the Rhone Glacier , at the junction of the pass roads built in 1865 and 1895 from Oberwald to the Furka and Grimsel passes and is only inhabited in the summer months from June to September. In the other months the road to Gletsch and the passes from Oberwald is closed.
The hotel settlement
In the 1830s, Joseph Anton Zeiter opened an inn with around twelve beds at the foot of the Rhone Glacier. The Seiler hotelier dynasty expanded this hostel from the 1850s to the Hotel Glacier du Rhône and acquired considerable parts of the surrounding area, which also included parts of the glacier. For the first time in the Valais hotel building, the design element of the central risalit appeared , between two symmetrical three-story structures with five window axes on the long side, each of which was built in 1861 or 1870 at the latest. The protruding three-axle central wing stands on the site of the old inn. The hotel had its heyday during the Wilhelminian era or the Belle Epoque .
In the later Belle Epoque, the hotel and its dépendance, the Blauhaus, under the management of Joseph Seiler (1858–1929), offered 320 guest beds, around 200 in the 1920s and 150 until the 1980s 500 meters higher, and an hour's carriage ride in the direction of the Furka Pass) on the glacier flank next to the artificial ice grotto, with a panoramic view of the Valais and Bernese Alps, the Hotel Belvédère , which was enlarged several times in the Belle Epoque, as was the Hotel Glacier du Rhône and In its heyday it could accommodate 90 travelers.
Gletsch was a “transit station in alpine traffic” , “tourist meeting point” , alpine “ caravanserai ” and horse-changing station in public and private horse-drawn carriage traffic. The Hotel Belvédère was also referred to as "perhaps the largest inn in Switzerland at times" (Walliser Bote No. 67, 1938) and before or after the carriage ride (or hike) over the passes that connect the Valais with the cantons of Bern and Uri, utilized. A trip up the valley from Brig , and then over the Furka, for example to Göschenen , where the Gotthard Railway had stopped since 1882, took around twelve hours before road traffic was motorized (cf.Karl Baedeker: Die Schweiz, 25th edition, Leipzig 1893, p 110). In the opposite direction about eleven, and thus considerably longer than a pleasant tourist day trip, which required the consumption of meals with several stops, as well as at least one overnight stay on the route - preferably in an attractive location. The ramifications of the two pass roads contributed to the importance of Gletsch, as did a catering offer that also met extensive requirements (such as those of the European aristocracy of the time), and especially the proximity of the glacier to the hotel and road, which was praised in the travel guides of the time: "Nowhere in Switzerland [could] you drive a car so close to the edge of a chaotically jagged glacier that was beautiful in its color" (Meyer's travel books, Switzerland, 20th edition, Leipzig and Vienna 1908, p. 213). )
After Alexander Seiler the Elder (1819-1891) from Blitzingen had already established a foothold in Zermatt as a hotelier in the first half of the 1850s , his brother Franz (1827-1865) pleaded at the community meeting on December 29, 1857 in Münster for the transfer von Boden for the purpose of expanding Zeiter's hostel at the foot of the Rhone glacier. On June 22nd, 1858, the Valais State Council confirmed the construction plans, which were implemented by 1861 at the latest and the modest hostel was first extended to the west by a large three-story extension. The opening of the pass road over the Furka in the second half of the 1860s increased the number of travelers to such an extent that a second enlargement of the main building (from 40 to 120 beds) was necessary, as it was probably done in the years 1868 and 1869: in pictures From the year 1870, an identical structure appears symmetrically added to the east and a central projection on the site of the original building from the 1830s.
Joseph Seiler decided in 1892, one year after the death of his father Alexander , to devote himself to Gletsch . The oldest of the three second-generation brothers working in the hotel business, grew up in the Zermatt hotel world of his parents, which was probably the largest hospitality company in Switzerland at the time (cf.e.g. Neue Zürcher Zeitung of June 24, 1977) and had himself in Technical training in Rome and London . He steadily expanded the hotel complex during the Belle Epoque, using important Valais furniture from the 17th and 18th centuries, the value of which was hardly recognized in the region, and other antiques, especially historical images of the glacier and the area, some based on English Composition principles an extraordinary hotel interior , which corresponded to the taste of its international clientele, and gave the company an outstanding reputation overall.
The Glacier du Rhône was considered an “excellently managed” hotel “in a great location” . "In this [was] taken into account by the most distinguished international company that flocks in one, two and three-horse wagons [e], including the tourist" . (Karl Kinzel: How do you travel in Switzerland ?, Schwerin 1913, p. 89).
In the 1920s, the demands of travelers who stopped at the junction of the pass road were sometimes higher than in any Swiss hotel today: “You are served by waiters in tails, eat the menu of a grand hotel and have gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in as table companions deepest detail ”. (Hans Schmid, in: St. Jodern Calendar: Gletsch, Sitten 1928).
Since Joseph Seiler knew about the importance of his hotel as a relay and horse changing station, he saw the construction of the Brig-Furka-Disentis-Bahn before the First World War with reservations. In return for leaving land for the railway line, he demanded that the trains stop in Gletsch for an hour at lunchtime in order to encourage the passengers to have a meal. The evening trains ended in Gletsch to increase the number of overnight stays. So he tried to impose the rhythm of a journey in horse-drawn carriages on the railway.
Development after the First World War
During the First World War and in the following crisis years, Joseph Seiler needed the financial support of his two brothers Alexander the Younger (1864–1920) and Hermann (1876–1961), who had joined the Zermatt company after the death of their parents. In the mid-1920s, Hermann Seiler finally took over the operations in Gletsch completely, but his brother Joseph remained manager of the operations until his death in 1929. Hermann Seiler had led the Valais finance department through the First World War and as the central president of the Swiss hotel association Crisis between the world wars and during the Second World War particularly concerned with questions of hotel profitability and financing.
The decline of the hotel industry - transition to the canton of Valais
In the 1950s it had long been beyond question for Hermann Seiler that a hotel that could only be maintained for three and a half months, depending on the weather and location, was not viable in the long term. For this reason, the financier called the stock corporation into which he brought the two hotels and properties in the 1950s, not Hotels Seiler Gletsch AG, but, with a view to non-catering use, Immobilien Gletsch AG. The question in the middle of the century was whether the public sector wanted to continue the water management use initiated by Hermann Seiler in the late 1920s with a large project in the Gletsch valley basin, a reservoir.
In the tradition of the Swiss Grande Hôtellerie, the hotel was given up at this location in 1984, primarily due to the location and weather-related restriction of the operating time to three and a half months. In the 1970s, this company had 80 and most recently five dozen employees, the majority of whom returned to Gletsch for five or more seasons, the most qualified for several decades, year after year with a new contract - even in times of extreme hospitality staff shortages in Switzerland. Establishing a winter season in Gletsch was out of the question due to the danger of avalanches. Another reason was the cultural changes in travel, which began with the end of horse-drawn carriage times and the motorization of pass traffic around 1920 and with the expansion of the roads, especially since the 1960s, the increase in travel speed (by a factor of 7-8 in six decades) and through traffic (by, at peak times, an estimated factor of 100–200) immediately in front of the hotel, the retreat of the glacier, but also the decrease in the scenic attractiveness of the valley basin as a whole - all of this ideally connected with the fading of the Halle , Rousseau , romantic and Victorian travel culture-historical topos of the Swiss trip or Swiss tour in the Alps with sometimes very discerning guests.
On the part of the new owners, the canton of Valais, legal, landscape and water management approaches and interests were in the foreground until the second half of the 1980s. The catering offer was to be continued for the time being in a greatly simplified form with a tenant and a few employees, under “turning away from Seiler's hotel style” and focusing on “folk tourism” (Walliser Bote of October 2, 1984). In the second half of the 1980s, the projects that had been pursued since the 1950s to seal off the valley with a dam and to create a Rhone reservoir were abandoned.
As a result, the new owners made extensive investments in the hospitality industry; Today there is a seasonal hotel operation without categorization during the summer months.
In addition to the hotel and its outbuildings, Gletsch is home to the Furka mountain line steam train station (which was part of the Furka-Oberalp railway until 1981 ). The rail connection was established in 1915, but operations were discontinued in 1981 when the railway line over the Furka apex line was closed. The Furka Base Tunnel has existed since 1982 and enables an uninterrupted connection from the Valais to the Gotthard region. The last station before the tunnel is Oberwald, so Gletsch is no longer a station on this train connection. For this purpose, the steam railway-Furka mountain line Realp-Gletsch-Oberwald has been reopened in stages since the 1990s. The route has been open to traffic again since 2011. This means that the station is back in operation during the summer months. Since 1922, Gletsch has also been served by post bus lines.
Attractions
literature
- Walter Ruppen: Gletsch . In: Society for Swiss Art History (Hrsg.): Kunstdenkmäler der Schweiz (= vol. 64 ). Das Obergoms vol. 1. Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 1976, ISBN 3-7643-0728-5 , p. 151-155 .
- Mark Andreas Seiler: One glacier - one hotel - one family. Horizons of a Valais hotelier dynasty , Rotten Verlag, Visp 2012, ISBN 978-3-905756-67-8 .
Web links
- Rachel Siggen-Bruttin: Gletsch. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Historic homepage of the Seiler hotelier dynasty: Gletsch - aspects of travel culture and hotel business
- Furka mountain route steam train
- Documentary film by Südwestdeutschens Rundfunk about Gletsch as a rail transit station on the occasion of the opening of the Oberwald-Gletsch section of the Furka mountain route in August 2010
- Documentary film by Swiss broadcaster SRG, which shows the Gletsch settlement and the glacier floor from a helicopter's perspective