Saas-Fee

Saas-Fee is first mentioned in 1304. Its people were German-speaking Walsers, and in the same era many of them left the valley in the Walser migrations for lack of a living. Saas-Fee had its first chapel in 1535 and a new parish church in 1893; for centuries it was a mountain farming village on the plateau above the Saas Valley, reached by a mule track from Saas-Grund.

Tourism began with the first inn in the valley, at Saas-Grund, in 1833. The parish priest Johann Josef Imseng encouraged villagers to welcome visitors, and in 1849 he is said to have tried skiing on home-made boards, perhaps the first person in Switzerland to do so. Climbers came for the Allalinhorn, first climbed in 1856, and the surrounding peaks, local guides such as Alexander Burgener made their names, and hotels were built from the 1880s. In the 1920s André Gide set part of his novel The Counterfeiters in the village.

The road from Saas-Grund arrived only in 1951, and the village chose at once to keep cars out. The same year a ski school opened, and lifts followed: to Spielboden in 1954, Plattjen in 1962, Felskinn and Hannig in 1969, and in 1984 the underground Metro Alpin to the Mittelallalin. In 1965 a collapse of the Allalin Glacier killed 88 workers building the Mattmark dam at the head of the valley, most of them Italians.

Saas-Fee calls itself the Pearl of the Alps, after the thirteen peaks above 4,000 metres that surround it, the highest concentration in the Alps. It is a German-speaking Catholic community whose dialect, Walser German, is partly unintelligible even to speakers of Standard German. Many old customs have survived tourism: villagers still make their own traditional costumes, and costume and music societies perform at festivals and processions.

Writers have long come here. Carl Zuckmayer lived in Saas-Fee from 1957 until his death in 1977 and is buried there, and Gide used the village as a retreat from society in fiction. The ski chase in the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service was filmed on the slopes above the village, and Wham! shot the video for Last Christmas here in 1984; surviving cast and crew returned in 2024 to unveil a pillar marking the song's 40th anniversary.

The decision to ban cars, taken in 1951 to keep the air clean, shapes the character of the village, whose lanes of dark wooden houses are shared by walkers, skiers and small electric vehicles. A campus of the European Graduate School adds an unusual academic thread to resort life.

Saas-Fee had about 1,600 residents in 2020, more than a quarter of them foreign nationals in 2008, but around 6,600 beds for rent to visitors. Most people speak German as their first language. The village primary school had eight classes and 137 pupils in the 2010–2011 school year.

Tourism is almost the whole economy: in 2008 more than half of all service jobs were in hotels and restaurants, and agriculture had all but disappeared. In 2000 the village drew in more workers than it sent out.

Life follows the two seasons, winter and summer, with quiet spells in between. Without private cars, the bus to Visp is the lifeline to the Rhône valley, and in peak season the narrow lanes can become crowded when electric vehicles meet the stream of skiers coming off the slopes. A railway to the village was planned in the 20th century but never built, because villagers refused to sell the land.

Raclette is the dish of the Valais and of Saas-Fee's restaurants: a round of cheese is heated, in front of a fire or under a special machine, and the melted surface is scraped onto plates with boiled potatoes, cornichons and pickled onions. In the canton it is drunk with black tea or Fendant, the local white wine.

Cholera, from the Valais, is a covered pie traditionally filled with apples, pears, potatoes, onions, leeks, bacon and raclette cheese, usually from the Goms. Pain de seigle valaisan, the dense Valais rye bread, has a protected designation; its history goes back to the Middle Ages, when communal village ovens were fired only two or three times a year, and the bread is still served with raclette cheese and cured meats.

In the village itself, most eating happens around Obere Dorfstrasse and at mountain restaurants on the slopes. The most unusual is the revolving restaurant on the Mittelallalin, opened in 1985 at the top of the Metro Alpin and the highest of its kind in the world. Evenings are mostly spent in pubs and après-ski bars.