The making of St Moritz: how a bet with pioneer Victorian tourists launched winter haven for the rich

In September 1864 Johannes Badrutt, owner of the Faller pension in St Moritz, was bidding auf wiedersehen to his last British summer visitors, and pondering how to fill his rooms during the winter.

“Come back and spend Christmas in St Moritz. It’s sunnier and less rainy than London,” he suggested. “If you don’t like it, I’ll pay your travel costs. If you do, you can stay as long as you like.” It was an offer, so local legend goes, that the four English guests could not refuse. They returned to St Moritz in December and stayed until Easter.

And so, 150 years ago, the Swiss hotelier and the English tourists created what would become Europe’s first winter holiday resort and an Alpine playground for the international wealthy and famous.

The 2014-5 season, which opens next weekend, will be celebrated with a comprehensive programme of events marking the town’s glorious past and intended as a thank-you to those first visitors.

In 1864 local people used skis or sledge to get from A to B, but there were no established winter sports. After Badrutt’s gambit, however, going to St Moritz caught on among the British upper classes, who flocked to the village of 200 residents, attracting notables including Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II (who was overthrown before he saw the magnificent palace he commissioned overlooking Lake St Moritz), Friedrich Nietzsche, conductor Herbert von Karajan and the Shah of Iran.

After them came the celebrities: Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Brigitte Bardot and her husband Gunther Sachs, who in their turn have since been largely superseded by the world’s new privileged class: the bankers, business tycoons and heirs to family fortunes.

Martin Scherer, manager of the Schweizerhof Hotel reminisces about being sent to purchase white Moon Boots for Roger Moore several years ago. But the resort’s recently arrived PR boss, Paul Dutschmann, tops that with news of a family who have booked 46 rooms in the celebrated Kempinski Palace, including the presidential suite, at upwards of CHF 18,000 (just under £12,000) a night, for a fortnight.

In 1864, the first winter visitors were considered more potty than pioneering. With its high altitude, unsullied mountains, clean air, 300 days of sunshine a year and curative mineral waters it was a popular summer retreat for the weak and consumptive.

Visiting in winter was an odd idea even for the idle rich. And it took up to two days to get there from Britain, including a 12-hour trek up the winding Alpine road in horse-drawn carriages.

Early British tourists quickly made themselves at home, colonising Badrutt’s hotel and, when they tired of charades and fancy dress parties, played traditional games like golf, polo, tennis and cricket on the snow and ice and invented new pursuits.

It was considered a hoot to hurtle along the village streets on sleds and sleighs, terrifying the locals. Eventually the British were persuaded to build a proper bob run, much to everyone’s relief. They later formed the Tobogganing Club & The Cresta Run – male-only since 1929. The regulations they drew up would form the basis of Olympic sports and are still detailed in neatly typed documents at a tiny museum above the kindergarten in nearby Celerina.

As was their wont, the English gentlemen formed exclusive clubs, many of which still exist, such as the Shuttlecock, only open to those who have been unceremoniously ejected from the Cresta Run on the notorious Shuttlecock bend. Today, St Moritz is home to more than 5,000 people – 38% of them foreign – but getting there is still a trek for those lacking private jet or helicopter.

It takes the best part of four hours by train from Zurich. From the regional capital, Chur, the Red Train wends its way up through the mountains of what was once marketed as “Heidi-land” on a single-track Unesco-listed route of breathtaking beauty to Switzerland’s highest station.

The ubiquitous ski-hire shops of most Alpine resorts are curiously absent, despite the town having twice hosted the Winter Olympics (1928 and 1948) and being set to host the World Ski Championships, for the fifth time, in 2017. Instead, visitors are confronted with the luxury offerings of Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, Gucci, Miu Miu and the rest.

Badrutt’s pension Faller is now the Kulm hotel, a five-star palace acquired by Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos in 1968 to avoid it falling into the hands of the French group Club Med, whose family empire now owns large swaths of St Moritz.

And Badrutt, its original owner and the man who, incidentally, also brought electricity to the town, has gone from simple hotelier to local hero. In his original larch-panelled living room, little changed since the 19th century, Heinz E Hunkeler, the manager at Kulm, pulled a stack of black and white photographs from a cupboard with the careless mien of a man not given to nostalgia.

His hotel, he said, is unashamedly grand and very St Moritz, but has changed with the times. “This is a unique hotel and nothing can change that, but it is not stuffy or dusty. Before, a tie was a must after 7pm but people don’t want to come on holiday and wear a tie, though you still have to wear a jacket,” Hunkeler said. “St Moritz doesn’t want to be too chic and champagne but the fact is we don’t have many B&Bs or one-star hotels because the place has a certain cachet. If there was more mass tourism it wouldn’t be St Moritz.”

Though the town never really caught on with British royals (Prince Charles promised to come but never has), the early upper-class toffs who careered down St Moritz’s streets never gave way to the rowdy après ski crowd.

“We’ve managed to avoid the binge drinking. Maybe it’s just too expensive to get drunk in St Moritz, but we do know how to have a good time,” says Susi Wiprächtiger, a mountain guide and ski and swimming instructor in St Moritz.

Locals such as Ariane Ehrat, a former Swiss ski champion and head of St Moritz’s tourist board, say: “There is a perception that St Moritz is snobbish but this is not the reality. It is authentic.”

Its discreet, understated charm, however, comes at a price. The strong Swiss franc has made the resort even more expensive at a time when the well-off, as opposed to the fabulously rich, want more value than glamour for their money. St Moritz also suffers from the second-home syndrome that has blighted many other fashionable towns and cities.

Wiprächtiger points out steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal’s home overlooking the town, homes owned by the Heineken family, and property belonging to other unnamed wealthy families. About half the resort’s properties are second residences, and in the past decade several hotels have been transformed into luxury apartments, some of them by Norman Foster. Today, the conundrum for St Moritz, which featured in Hitchcock’s 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much, at least two Bond films and Private Lives by Noël Coward, is how to encourage more tourism but not mass tourism. The resort wants to have its traditional Engadiner Nusstorte (a nut cake) and eat it.

The old and the new rub shoulders in St Moritz. Wooden chalets and traditional Alpine homes mix with gleaming modern condominiums costing CHF 100,000 a week; celebrities share slopes with youngsters who speak Romansh – the least-spoken of Switzerland’s four official languages – until they go to school to be taught high German, Swiss German, English and Italian.

Retired teacher Edith Grob, 84, from near Basel, has spent her holidays in St Moritz for 38 years – three weeks in winter, four in summer – and swears by the local mineral baths and spas. She says St Moritz has to remember its roots. “You can walk around and discover so much wonderful nature and landscapes. Sometimes I feel I owe St Moritz part of my life.”

Ehrat agrees that St Moritz has to use this celebrated past to reinvent itself. “These urbane people came in 1864 and were so creative thinking up new activities. They brought their culture and mixed it with ours. We have to know this past and celebrate it, but we need to use it to create a successful future for St Moritz.

“These British people were our founding fathers. They were pioneers and we need some of their spirit today.”

• This article was amended on 17 November 2014 to correct the price of the presidential suite at the Kempinksi Palace to 18,000 Swiss francs a night. We were originally misinformed that it was 40,000.