Davos developed in the 19th century as a health resort specifically for tuberculosis patients, its high alpine altitude and clean, dry air believed by 19th-century physicians to have genuine therapeutic benefits for respiratory illness, drawing sanatoriums and long-term patients from across Europe, including, for a period, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. This medical heritage faded through the 20th century as antibiotic treatments for tuberculosis made high-altitude convalescence largely obsolete, and Davos gradually reinvented itself first as a winter sports destination and later as something else entirely.
Since 1971, Davos has hosted the annual World Economic Forum, a gathering of political leaders, business executives, and public figures that has made the town’s name globally synonymous with elite international summitry, an identity now arguably more prominent worldwide than its original mountain resort character.
A Ski Resort Shaped by Its Own Layout
Davos sits at over 1,500 metres, making it one of the highest towns in Europe, and its unusually long, linear layout along a single valley floor, rather than clustering around a central village square as many alpine resorts do, gives it a genuinely distinct character among Swiss ski destinations. The surrounding ski area connects to nearby Klosters, forming a substantial combined region popular with both recreational skiers and, historically, European royalty who favoured the area’s relative discretion.
Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, set in a fictionalised Davos sanatorium, drew directly on his wife’s real stay at a tuberculosis clinic in the town, embedding Davos’s medical history into European literature well before the World Economic Forum gave the town its more contemporary fame.
Painting a Valley Town Between Peaks
Davos’s long valley setting beneath surrounding Alpine peaks gives a watercolourist dramatic scale and crisp mountain light to work with. We’ve captured that character in our own Davos Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Switzerland for a wall at home.
Built first for the sick and now known for summits of an entirely different kind, Davos remains a town whose reputation has changed almost completely without it ever moving from its valley.