Belalp

You reach Belalp via Naters and Blatten, where an eighty-person cable car covers 770 metres of altitude in four minutes. Up top, at just over 2,100 metres, there's not a car in sight. The view is reason enough why people have been coming here for a century and a half: you stand right on the edge of the Great Aletsch Glacier, with the 4,194-metre Aletschhorn towering directly above.

The ski area has around 45 kilometres of piste between 1,322 and 3,112 metres, with ten to eleven lifts. The Hohstock is freeride territory, with slopes reaching gradients of up to sixty per cent in places. For children there's the Hexenland nursery area with a magic carpet lift. The toboggan run from Belalp to Blatten measures seven to almost ten kilometres with 767 metres of descent, with sledge hire from CHF 14. There's also a short skating track at Chiematte and winter walking routes such as the eleven-kilometre Brischeru trail.

Every January the mountain turns into a witches' cauldron. The Belalp Hexe, held since 1983, sends more than fifteen hundred participants in witch costumes from the Hohstock down to Blatten: twelve kilometres and around 1,800 metres of descent. It's the biggest and loudest event in the region, and the next edition is scheduled for January 2027.

Summer here is surprisingly adventurous. There are fifteen kilometres of bike trails plus a Bike Skills Park in the Hexenland, and an eight-kilometre scooter-bike descent to Blatten for CHF 10. Canyoning in the Massa Gorge involves an eight-metre jump and a thirty-metre abseil, and the Hexenkessel rope park in Blatten has a two-hundred-metre zip line. The suspension bridge over the Massa Gorge towards Riederalp has been a classic since 2008. And for something quieter: the Tyndall Monument at 2,340 metres, named after the physicist who spent 44 summers here, offers the best glacier view on the entire alp. Winston Churchill stayed at the hotel, built in 1858, and wrote that it was magnificent, that he slept like a rose and felt healthier than ever.