The iconic Alpine hotel Resort Belvédère Rhonegletscher, Switzerland

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Located in one of the snowiest regions in Switzerland, the Furka Pass, connecting the cantons of Uri and Valais in the country’s south-central region, is considered to be one of the “most iconic, exhilarating and exciting drives” through the Swiss Alps. The scenic road with its tight switchbacks curving up the picturesque mountainside attracts countless tourists. There is the Rhone Glacier with its ice grotto—a one hundred meter long tunnel drilled through the glacier every year that glows in an unearthly shade of blue—as well as attractive options for hiking, climbing and skiing. The Furka Pass even played a brief cameo in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger.

As the road switches back and forth hugging the side of the ountain, at one point near the top of the pass, it comes within 200 meters of the Rhone Glacier. It was here, in 1882, the young hotelier, Josef Seiler, built a hotel in one of the hairpin bends. Over the decades Hotel Belvédère became one of the most iconic hotels of the Swiss Alps. Nowhere else in the world could one drive a car so close to the edge of a glacier, check into a hotel room with balconies overlooking the massive river of ice, and then walk down a paved path to the glacier below located only a couple of hundred yards away.

The building of Hotel Belvédère belongs to the last major wave of development that began in the whole of Switzerland in the 1880s. During this time the number of hotels in Valais increased from 79 in 1880 to over 320 just before the First World War—a four time increase in just over three decades. The number of beds during the same period increased from just under 4,000 to over 15,000.

Hotel Belvédère’s panoramic location attracted a pampered clientele who took residence sometimes for several weeks at a stretch during the summers. At the turn of the 20th century, when the hotel industry boomed throughout Switzerland, Josef Seiler dared a new extension to the hotel—a gable roof with two additional floors, giving the hotel its current appearance. The number of beds in 1907 rose to ninety.

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