Hikes in Graubünden, Switzerland

Seven hikes in Graubünden, from the Engadine to the Val Bregaglia: the Morteratsch Glacier, Piz Lunghin, the Val di Campo and Lago di Cama in Mesolcina.

Graubünden is the largest canton in Switzerland and, for anyone coming from Lombardy, one of the closest: from the Valchiavenna you climb into the Val Bregaglia and to the Maloja, from the Valtellina you enter the Val Poschiavo, and from Bellinzona you head up the Mesolcina. It is a land of long, high valleys, with lakes as broad as those of Sils and Silvaplana, glaciers that are still imposing and a network of paths and public transport that makes even point-to-point routes easy to organise. Our hikes here are concentrated between the Upper Engadine and the Italian-speaking valleys.

Near the Maloja are the balcony path from Silvaplana to the pass, Lake and Piz Lunghin, with views of the Bernina and Lake Sils, and the long climb to the Capanna del Forno in the Val Bregaglia; above Pontresina, the Boval hut looks out over the Morteratsch Glacier. Further east, Alp and Munt La Schera overlook the Lago di Livigno from the Swiss National Park, while to the south the Val di Campo above Poschiavo holds the Saoseo and Viola lakes, at their best between October and November, and Lago di Cama sits in an amphitheatre of peaks in the Mesolcina.

Good to know

Graubünden is also Switzerland's only officially trilingual canton, with German, Romansh and Italian. Romansh, a Romance language descended from the Latin once spoken in the Alps, is the main language of about 15 per cent of the canton's inhabitants, a share that has halved in the space of half a century, and it is still very much alive in the Engadine and the Val Müstair; Italian is spoken in the Val Bregaglia, the Val Poschiavo, the Mesolcina and the Calanca. That is why maps show names such as Piz and Munt alongside Italian ones, sometimes only a few kilometres apart.

Graubünden's other heritage runs on rails. In 2008 UNESCO added the Albula and Bernina lines of the Rhaetian Railway to its World Heritage list; they cross the Alps on viaducts such as the Landwasser and through spiral tunnels, and the Bernina line, from St. Moritz to Tirano by way of Pontresina and Poschiavo, is among the steepest adhesion railways in the world. For walkers it is also simply practical, with a stop at Morteratsch, at the mouth of the glacier's valley.