St. Moritz

Bronze Age votive offerings, swords and needles found at the base of the springs show that people knew the mineral waters of St. Moritz long before the village was first mentioned, around 1137–39, as ad sanctum Mauricium, after Saint Maurice of the Theban Legion. Pilgrims came to drink the bubbling water at the church of the springs in hope of healing; in 1519 Pope Leo X promised full absolution to anyone who made the pilgrimage, and Paracelsus stayed in 1535. The first scientific treatises on the springs were written in the 16th century.

Summer visitors came for the cure, but winter tourism began with a wager. In September 1864 the hotelier Caspar Badrutt told four British summer guests that if they returned in winter and disliked it he would pay their travel costs, and if they enjoyed it they could stay as his guests for as long as they wished. The wager marked the start of winter tourism in the Alps; the first tourist office in Switzerland opened the same year. Firsts followed: Switzerland's first electric light in 1878, the first curling tournament on the continent in 1880, the Cresta Run in 1884, a bob run in 1890, electric trams in 1896, and horse racing on the frozen lake from 1907.

St. Moritz hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948, one of only four places to do so twice, and has staged four Alpine World Ski Championships, the last in 2017, and the bobsleigh and skeleton world championships a record 21 times. Since 1987 its tourist office has held the trademark Top of the World.

The original language of St. Moritz was Puter, the Romansh dialect of the Upper Engadin; in 1880 half the population still spoke it, but trade and tourism brought German and Italian, and by 1970 only about 8 per cent spoke Romansh. Today the town is mostly German-speaking, with a large Italian-speaking minority and a Portuguese community.

For a century and a half St. Moritz has been a stage for the wealthy and famous. Its property owners have included the conductor Herbert von Karajan, the Shah of Iran and the industrialist Giovanni Agnelli, and it has appeared in Hitchcock's 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much and, by name, in several James Bond films. The painter Giovanni Segantini spent his last years in the Engadin, and the museum built for his work in 1908 is one of the town's cultural landmarks.

Sport shapes the calendar. Students from Oxford and Cambridge played bandy here in 1885, the forerunner of their ice hockey Varsity Match; the Cresta Run is still raced by its club's members; polo, horse racing and cricket have all been played on the frozen lake; and in summer the town's altitude draws distance athletes, particularly cyclists, runners and race walkers, for altitude training.

St. Moritz had about 4,900 residents in 2020, but some 13,000 beds for visitors in hotels and rental units, which are staffed in part by some 3,000 seasonal employees. It is a regional economic centre for the Upper Engadin as well as a resort: in 2014 more than 7,500 people worked in the municipality, and more than a thousand cross-border workers commuted from outside Switzerland in 2016.

Households are small, averaging fewer than two people in 2014, and in 2000 most residents spoke German, with Italian second. The town spreads across the Dorf on the slope, the Bad by the lake, part of Champfèr and Suvretta.

Life follows the two seasons. Winter brings skiers, the lake events and the busiest weeks of the year; summer brings walkers, cyclists and athletes in training, and the weeks between the seasons are quiet. The Rhaetian Railway and postbuses tie the town to the other Engadin villages and to Chur.

The cooking of Graubünden is mountain food. Capuns are pieces of Spätzle dough mixed with dried meat such as Bündnerfleisch or salsiz sausage, rolled in chard leaves, boiled in a mixture of bouillon, milk and water and served under grated cheese. Bündnerfleisch itself, also called viande des Grisons, is meat air-dried in the canton.

The Engadiner Nusstorte, also called the Bündner Nusstorte, is a caramelised walnut filling baked in shortcrust pastry; the modern version was invented in the 1920s and became widely available in the 1960s, and it is a traditional sweet of the whole canton, made throughout Graubünden and one of the largest export products of its independent bakers.

In St. Moritz itself, eating ranges from mountain huts on the Corviglia and Corvatsch slopes to formal dining rooms; the ski areas around the town have dozens of restaurants between them. The Chesa Veglia, a farmhouse of 1658, has been turned into restaurants and bars, and the town hosts a gourmet festival.