Saint Moritz hosted the Winter Olympics twice, in 1928 and again in 1948, the latter making it the first city ever to host the Winter Games a second time, and notably the 1948 Games were held in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a period when few other cities had the intact infrastructure or resources to stage such an event at all. The resort’s alpine sporting reputation stretches back even further, and Saint Moritz is often credited as the birthplace of winter tourism itself, following a wager in 1864 by hotelier Johannes Badrutt, who bet a group of English summer guests that the Alpine winter would be milder and more enjoyable than they expected, an invitation that, once accepted, effectively launched the entire concept of winter alpine holidays.
The Cresta Run, a natural ice skeleton racing track built in Saint Moritz in 1884, remains in operation today, one of the oldest winter sport venues still functioning largely as originally designed, drawing daredevil riders down its icy curves at speeds exceeding 130 kilometres per hour.
A Resort That Attracted Wealth Deliberately
Saint Moritz cultivated a reputation for exclusivity from early in its development as a winter destination, its grand belle époque hotels, several still operating today, drawing European aristocracy and later international celebrities, a positioning the resort has maintained deliberately across more than a century of change in the broader ski industry. The town’s high-altitude lakes freeze solid enough each winter to host horse racing and even golf directly on the ice, unusual traditions that persist as part of the resort’s distinctive social calendar.
Saint Moritz’s clear, dry climate, similar in principle to what drew tuberculosis patients to nearby Davos, was marketed from an early stage as a genuine health benefit alongside its recreational appeal, a dual identity that shaped much of its early growth.
Painting a Resort of Snow and Grand Hotels
Saint Moritz’s grand hotel architecture against its frozen lake and surrounding peaks gives a watercolourist elegant colour and dramatic alpine scale to work with. We’ve captured that setting in our own Saint Moritz Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Switzerland for a wall at home.
Born from a hotelier’s bet and twice trusted with the Olympics, Saint Moritz remains a resort whose reputation for winter has always rested on rather more than just snow.