Arosa Arises

The small and pretty Swiss ski resort of Arosa has just linked with the over-the-mountains bigger region of Lenzerheide and trebled its kms of piste from 70 to 225km– thus providing a serious challenge for visitors.

We at GSG have always lauded Arosa as a brilliant area to learn and to get beginners improving – but with not too much for the experts.

But now it has put in a fast, four-minute funicular connection it has all the red and black runs of Lenzerheide too, and an extra 155km of pisted slopes. This makes the plush resort more attractive to families and mixed groups and long-distance skiers who will love the runs of Lenzerheide and then back on Arosa side the 3km downhill red swoop to the home base station.

We just spent a weekend of bliss testing out the runs of both resorts and found half a metre of fresh snow and surprisingly-few crowds, and thought the area exhilarating. And a very welcome escape from the turmoil of the Arlberg, where we had a week of fighting piste warriors on the ultra-steep and Oxford-Street busy slopes. Why is it the Austrians and Germans love to ski in gangs of 50 to upwards of 150 – very off-putting for careful Brits.

So this made Arosa all the more enticing and no wonder the British Royal family loved it – William, Kate and Harry visited last year, and luxuriated at the recently refurbed and ultra-glitzy Tschuggen Grand  Hotel, which even has its very own cable car from the ski room door to the start of the bowl of pistes sitttting above.

The Tschuggen Grand Hotel is a Leading Hotel of the World and a ski hotel extraordinaire – with one of the best hotel spas in the world, a 5,000 square metre waterworld where you can soothe away all your aches and pains and luxuriate in the plush treatment rooms or play in one of its five pools.

Excellent cuisine too led by the hotel’s main restaurant La Vetta, presided over by superchef Tobias Jochim, which boasts a Michelin Star and 15 Gault&Millau Points.

Arosa is at the end of a valley just 90 minutes train ride from Zurich via Chur. And do take the train rather than drive yourself – we have done this by motor and found the 365 bends and multitude of hairpins rather vertigo-inducing.

And if your wallet is not banker-fat for the Tschuggen Grand Hotel there is an abundance of accommodation for all grades and we found the locals in Arosa extremely friendly and very welcoming to Brits.

Tschuggen Grand Hotel
Sonnenbergstrasse
CH-7050 Arosa, Switzerland
+41 (0)81 378 99 99

info@tschuggen.ch / Tschuggen