by Diccon Bewes
The Junior United Alpine Club tackled the hike much more seriously, employing various measures to keep up the pace: a quick step, beating time with their alpenstocks, linking arms and eventually that faithful standby, “diligent plodding”. As Mr William wrote, “It took us four and a half hours … you may be sure we were well tired when we reached the top at half past nine o’clock.”
The group was taking a well-beaten track, a path that had been widened in 1819, with the help of inmates from Lucerne’s prisons, to accommodate sedan chairs and donkeys, and upgraded again 20 years later to allow horses. This was all to make it more comfortable for the tourists – around 50,000 a year at that time – flocking to pay homage to Queen Rigi. This deluge of visitors sustained jobs such as porters, guides, luggage carriers, horsemen and delivery boys (bread was taken up on foot, starting at 2am so that hotel guests at the top could enjoy it fresh for breakfast), all better paid than farming. Not forgetting the beggars and yodlers, as even that was preferable to starving (such as in the famine of 1816–17). By 1863, a horseman earned ten francs for a trip up Rigi, and that at a time when the average farm worker was on less than two francs a day; no wonder they fought for every customer. The arrival of a boat in Weggis often led to undignified scuffles and such chaotic scenes at the dock that the authorities had to introduce minimum standards and fixed rates. All of that – the jobs, the fights, the money – disappeared when the train line opened in 1871.
As in Neuhaus and Frutigen, the train killed the tourist trade for those left behind, but in Weggis the story could have had a different ending. The village was given the chance to be the starting point for this new technological wonder but had refused, scared of what it meant for their horsemen, chair carriers and others. Too much competition was not a good thing; they wanted to keep their share of the pie for themselves, but in trying to do that they ended up giving it all away. The train line started further along the lake-shore, in Vitznau, and Weggis died for a while, deprived of the oxygen of tourism.
One history book on Rigi quotes the reaction of a local man who returned at that time:
Back in my home town, the abandoned almost dying Weggis! Abandoned by tourism, Rigi tourism gone, the barely-awakened hotel industry in its final throes, neglected farming, bleak earning potential, that was the sign of those times.
The local council put it more succinctly – “Ever since the Rigi Bahn is in service, tourism between Weggis and Rigi has almost come to a standstill” – but the village eventually bounced back and today has an air of genteel prosperity about it. It also has a modern cable car up the mountain.
The Rigi Bahn was “one of the most novel features in mountain climbing”, according to the Cook Handbook. It was also an instant success. The starting capital was raised in Zurich in a few hours and investors saw a healthy return: shares with a nominal value of 500 francs in August 1871 were worth 1350 francs a year later. That was mainly down to the line carrying 60,000 passengers in its first summer, despite the three trains being slow and small, which meant ridiculously long waiting times. At peak periods, passengers catching the first ship of the day from Lucerne would have to queue in Vitznau until 3pm to get on a train. They must have been foreigners, as no Swiss would ever stand in line for that long, even for a train ride. And after all that waiting, at first they couldn’t even reach the summit by train. That was only possible in 1873, not through lack of demand or failures in technology, but because of the Swiss political system; in other words, cantons.
Rigi sits across the border of Cantons Lucerne and Schwyz, with the summit squarely in the latter. When it came to building a railway, each canton granted its concession to a different company and the race was on to see who would finish first. The Lucerners won when their line from Vitznau opened on 21 May 1871, after a slight delay caused by the Franco-Prussian War, which had prevented the delivery of enough rails. However, that line could only run as far as the cantonal border at Staffelhöhe, where passengers had to get out and walk the last few hundred metres. The Schwyzer line, coming up the back of the mountain from Goldau, wasn’t completed until 1875, although those canny Schwyzers built the top section first. After that part opened in June 1873, they rented the tracks to their rivals, so earning money from the others running trains to the summit. As for the Vitznau line, it had to increase to ten locomotives to cope with the demand. The two lines merged in 1992, although you can still see their origins in the different liveries: red trains for Vitznau, blue and white for Goldau.
There were other schemes to transport visitors up Rigi, which at the time probably didn’t seem any more outlandish than a mountain railway. In the book Rigi: Mehr als ein Berg, there’s the great story of a Dr Schnyder, who planned a line using the recently unemployed porters and guides as ballast. Twice a day, 44 men would walk up and so act as a counterweight to haul the tourists up. While he was serious, it never happened. Or consider the slightly less bizarre Luftbahn, or air railway, with giant hot-air balloons carrying 200 passengers and tethered to a guide rail. That never got off the ground either.
The 1864 air railway: one of the weirder plans to transport people up Rigi
The train killed off the horse and chair trade up the mountain, not just because it was trendy and exciting but because it was also quicker and cheaper. In 1871 it cost 5 francs for a one-way ticket, 7.50 francs for a return (which is roughly what the train driver earned per day). Compare that to the three porters, at 6 francs each, needed to carry someone up in a sedan chair, plus an extra porter for the luggage, or 10 francs for a horse and guide, and that was just for the upward journey. So while some jobs disappeared at the bottom of the mountain, many others were created by the hotel boom on the mountain. This was not only at the summit, known as Kulm, but all the way up at Kaltbad, Scheidegg and Staffelhöhe. Rigi became one giant dormitory, at least for a few decades. In a way, the story of the Rigi hotels is a mirror of tourist development in Switzerland: small at first, then a boom, followed by long-term growth and coping with the down times.
In 1816 Joseph Bürgi opened the first guesthouse on the summit, with a grand total of six beds. Within a couple of years, he was accommodating over 1000 guests each summer, so he expanded again and again to cope with the demand. By the time Miss Jemima arrived there were two hotels, together sleeping 330; more in peak season when the owners rented out the staff rooms to cope with the demand. Murray warns:
During the height of summer, when travellers are most numerous, the Kulm inn is crammed to overflowing every evening; numbers are turned away from the doors, and it is not easy to procure beds, food, or even attention.
Miss Jemima stayed in the newest addition, the Regina Montium (or “Monstrum” as it was dubbed), with its 25m long dining room that could seat 200 at one sitting. Rooms cost 4 francs a night including lighting and service, breakfast was 1.50 francs and dinner 3 francs (altogether 8.50 francs for an overnight stay, or about 120 francs in today’s money). Then came the railway, and the age of the palace hotel.
The Grand Hotel Schreiber made the others on the summit look like little summerhouses in its garden. Its huge, opulent design came from a familiar hand, that of star hotel architect Edouard Horace Davinet whose work we saw in Interlaken, and it took 2½ years to build (having to bring everything up by train didn’t help). Five storeys high with 300 beds, it looked like a French château that had been airlifted onto the summit, complete with billiard room, music rooms and two restaurants. But there weren’t many toilets. The original floor plans show that even such a grand hotel had very few: a typical bedroom floor had 38 rooms, with 64 beds in total, and 4 WCs. The hotel opened on 7 June 1875 and cost 20 francs a night, including food and drink, which was the same as a week’s wages for the average hotel worker. The Schreiber brothers wanted the highest quality available, so they employed Cäsar Ritz, a Swiss hotelier from Valais who was still 13 years away from transforming the London hotel scene. One Ritz story that made the news around the world is recounted in the book 175 Jahre
Rigi Kulm Hotel by Felix Weber:
Forty Americans arrived during a freak summer snowstorm expecting warmth and sustenance. The hotel’s heating had failed, so Ritz hauled four palm trees out of their giant copper tubs, which he promptly filled with oil and lit to warm the dining room. Forty big stones were also heated and distributed to defrost diners’ cold feet while they ate. The cold starter was replaced by hot bouillon with egg, the ice cream changed for flambéed crepes. Ritz, and the hotel, gained nothing but praise.
In 1890 there were over 2000 beds available at all the Rigi hotels. Then again, there were over 150,000 visitors a year. Rigi was the tourist centre of Switzerland and its development showed no signs of stopping. This was the Belle Époque, the era when Swiss tourism could do no wrong, the age of mountain trains and cable cars, posh hotels and wealthy guests. And the Schreiber was the crown on the head of the Queen of Mountains.
Such luxury came at a price, however. The monthly transport bill for bringing food up to the summit was 2300 francs in August 1903 (about 31,000 francs today). That’s not surprising once you see that month’s shopping list:
14,100 bread rolls
141 kg crackers
1,730 kg bread
5,760 eggs
4,500 litres beer
2,752 kg meat
37 ox tongues
334 kg fish
1,980 kg chicken
At the other end of things, there was the “Rigi Disease” (aka diarrhoea, or maybe Rigi’s Revenge), which continually plagued many guests, and even typhoid, which recurred as late as 1932. It took a while to realise that the sewage from the highest hotels was polluting the water of those at the bottom. That was a very real side-effect of building too many hotels in a confined space with no infrastructure.
As we have seen all across Switzerland, the golden era ended in the summer of 1914. Neutral Switzerland stayed out of the Great War but its visitors stayed at home, with their only trips abroad being to the trenches. Swiss holidays were off the agenda, as one example shows. In 1913 a total of 2.3 million passengers sailed on the Lake Lucerne paddle steamers; such a figure (the same as the current annual tally) would not be reached again until 1928, by which time it was almost too late for the Rigi hotels to recover. The original Kulm hotel burned down in 1935 and the remaining two started to fall apart. With so few guests, it wasn’t worth repairing the holes and rain soon leaked into all the rooms. Other grand hotels at Kaltbad and Scheidegg either went up in flames or were pulled down.
By 1952, the giant Kulm hotels were unkempt and unsightly, and so large that they ruined the view from the summit, so they were demolished and all traces of grandeur were wiped off the mountain. In their place one smaller hotel was built, in the traditional style of an Alpine hospice, such as at the Great St Bernard Pass – and that’s where we will spend the night, having booked in advance, just as Miss Jemima did: “Our beds had been secured by telegram from Lucerne.” I sent an email.
From Vitznau up to Rigi Kulm only takes half an hour by train, but it is 30 of the most enjoyable minutes in Switzerland. As soon as you board the red carriage, it’s immediately clear that this is no ordinary mountain train – not because it was the first one in Europe, but simply because of its size: it’s as wide as a normal train carriage. The Rigi Bahn runs on a standard gauge (1435mm), whereas other rack railways in Switzerland use narrower ones, for example 1000mm for the BOB or 800mm for the Pilatus Bahn. If that means as little to you as to me, suffice to say that there’s none of that feeling squashed and uncomfortable that you get on most mountain trains; plenty of cat-swinging space on this line. The train chugs up behind the village church, then seemingly through people’s back gardens, so it’s no real surprise when we stop to let off a woman with her bulging bags of shopping. It’s almost like a community bus and is often the only way to reach the hillside houses other than on foot.
Once clear of the village, we climb on through the fir trees, with patches of blue water popping up here and there in the background. The higher we go, the better the views across the lake to craggy Mount Pilatus. A couple of walkers get off at Grubisbalm, where a sign advertises an eco-hotel; super view, but really in the middle of nowhere.
Ever upward we go to Kaltbad, the main stop on the mountain even though it’s only halfway up, at 1433m. This once used to be a rail junction, with a line going off along the southern ridge to Scheidegg, 6km away. Despite opening at the height of Rigi’s popularity in 1875, the line was bankrupt within three years, only to be resurrected before finally being dismantled in 1942. Not every tourist venture was a success, although the old route now makes a pleasant walk. Today it’s the cable car from Weggis that ends at Kaltbad, but there’s also a post office and village shop among the clutch of buildings.
The village began as a curative centre, where patients would bathe fully clothed in the cold natural springs (“Kaltbad” means cold bath) and then sit in the sun until they dried. That sounds like a way to catch your death rather than be cured. Far more relaxing is the warm water of the fancy new spa designed by the latest Swiss über-architect, Mario Botta, with his trademark curves, stripes and acres of stone. Above stands its ugly sister, the concrete block of a hotel that replaced the last of Rigi’s palace hotels. On the night of 9 February 1961, the 111-year-old Grand Hotel Kaltbad burnt down, killing 11 people in the process. One survivor was a young waiter named Erich von Däniken, who most likely thought that aliens started the fire and had the idea for a certain book that became a bestseller.
We wait a while at Kaltbad, ostensibly for any passengers transferring from the cable car, but actually so that a teenage boy riding in the train driver’s cab can dash off to a house up the street, disappear inside for a minute, then sprint back down to climb back on board. It may be a tourist line, but the locals make great use of it. Ruth Reinecke-Dahinden, one of the many children who grew up in Kaltbad, recently wrote a book, simply called Die Rigi, about her mountain home. Between the old photos are great details such as the Grand Hotel Kaltbad having cows milked directly outside the hotel so guests could have fresh milk. I couldn’t resist contacting her, to hear her stories of life on Rigi. Listening to her, it’s clear how the hotel boom gave farming families in the nineteenth century a crucial extra income from working in the laundry or gardens, or as dishwashers and waiters. For better or worse, tourism changed the face of Rigi for ever.
A couple of hundred metres higher is Staffel, where the blue-and-white train from Goldau arrives on the neighbouring track and races us to the top. We win, and pull into Kulm station, 1752m above sea level. The final 45m are only accessible by a footpath, but are an essential final step in order to see all 360 degrees of the panorama. Only then is it possible to appreciate why so many thousands have come over the centuries: the Queen of the Mountains is surrounded by the best scenery in central Switzerland, ringed by lakes and with the whole Alps punctuating the horizon. Such a shame that some idiot plonked a giant communications tower on the mountain top; how to spoil a view in one easy lesson.
On the way down from the summit I notice something peculiar. Rigi isn’t one big lump of rock; it’s a granular mass of thousands of stones that have clumped together. The technical term is conglomerate, which is essentially a big word for thousands of pebbles stuck together by strong gluey cement. It looks as if it would fall apart if you stamped hard on it, but of course it doesn’t, although this is not the most stable of rock formations. In September 1806 a vast section of Rossberg, a nearby mountain of conglomerate, slid down into the valley below, wiping out Goldau along with 457 people. It was one of Switzerland’s worst natural disasters, and still traumatic enough for Murray to devote four pages to describing the event in detail more than fifty years later.
With perfect timing, we enter the hotel as the clouds race in. Within a few minutes, the view has vanished into a dense mass of swirling grey and it’s not long before the rain is lashing down. But this is no passing storm like before and two hours later the rain has still
not let up, giving us a grand view of nothing at supper in the panorama restaurant.
Luckily we have something to keep our minds off the damp outdoors: chatting to the hotelier. Renate Käppeli’s family has owned the hotel since its modern incarnation opened in 1954, and she is more than happy to show off the oversized gilt mirrors, which once graced the walls of the Schreiber, the palace hotel that was pulled down in the 1950s after a crusade against it from the conservationists.
The Schweizer Heimatschutz, or Swiss Heritage Society, was founded in 1905 with the aim of protecting both the architectural and environmental heritage of Switzerland. Its foundation was a response to the decades of endless development in the Swiss Alps, where nowhere seemed safe from hotels and railway lines. The final straw was a plan to build a train line up to the top of the Matterhorn; you might as well turn Heidi into a prostitute at the same time. Plans aborted, national icon saved and a new voice found, one that made itself heard loud and clear. After the Second World War, the society had plenty to say about Rigi Kulm, with its dilapidated hotels and plethora of souvenir stands spoiling the view. It was time they went.
A public campaign selling chocolate coins (this is Switzerland, after all) raised 330,000 francs for the restoration of Rigi to its natural state. The Regina Montium and Schreiber hotels, so long a symbol of the triumph of tourism, were dismantled and replaced with a more sombre, more Swiss creation. On the 50th birthday of the Heritage Society, a giant bonfire on top of Rigi reduced the last remains of the hotels to ashes. The soul of Rigi had been saved – only for it to be sold a decade later in the form of a radio mast. Tearing down a century of history to restore the view is one thing; ripping it down to make way for something far uglier is pointless. Tourism, for all its faults, is part of Switzerland’s history, its heritage, and has helped make the country the way it is. Who knows, without the tourists the Swiss Heritage Society might not even have the money to be guardians of anything, let alone sell the family silver to the highest bidders.