The Kulm Hotel was the very first place in Switzerland to have electric lighting. It’s one of those so-what factoids that seems odder the more you look at it. The first place to have electric lights in Switzerland. Not Bern, Zurich or Geneva – but here, 1,822 metres up, in the lobby of a grand hotel in a remote mountain village that still takes a calendar day to travel to; that winding railway climb which grows slower and slower as it pulls higher and higher, until it rolls in, almost at a saunter, to St Moritz at the end of the line.
The Kulm must have looked otherworldly back then, like an alien ship that had taken a wrong turn at Alpha Centauri and descended on the valley to pull out its map – a humming, glowing entity above a cluster of candlelit huts and inns. What sorcery is this? What madness? It’s like Fitzcarraldo, that man who tried to drag a Victorian steamship across the hills of the Amazon to build a vast opera house in the remotest plains of the delta. This is the same, except it makes sense. And there’s fondue.The lights arrived in 1878, thanks to Thomas Badrutt, the hotelier and first son of the town (there have been plenty of others, but we’ll get to the playboys later), who also gives his name to the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in the village.
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