Estimated duration: 85 minutes
Overview
Welcome to Davos, the highest city in Europe at 1,560 metres above sea level, and a town whose name resonates far beyond its Alpine valley. Known globally as the host of the World Economic Forum, Davos has a story that stretches from tuberculosis sanatoriums to world-class skiing, from the literary imagination of Thomas Mann to the cutting-edge climate science conducted at its research institutes. Nestled in the Landwasser valley of the canton of Graubünden, surrounded by peaks reaching nearly 3,000 metres, Davos is a town of unexpected depth and fascinating contrasts. On this walking tour, you will stroll the elegant Promenade, discover a museum dedicated to one of the great Expressionist painters, stand before the Congress Centre where world leaders gather each January, and breathe the pure mountain air that first put this town on the map.
Let us begin.
Stop 1: Davos Platz Station and the Promenade
Start at Davos Platz railway station. Exit and walk north along the Promenade, the main boulevard.
You are standing at Davos Platz, the main centre of the town. Davos is actually two towns that have grown together: Davos Platz, the larger and more commercial settlement, and Davos Dorf, the village a couple of kilometres to the northeast. Together they form the municipality of Davos, which at 254 square kilometres is the largest commune by area in Switzerland, though much of that area is mountain wilderness.
The Promenade stretching before you is the main boulevard of Davos Platz, a wide, tree-lined street that serves as the commercial spine of the town. Hotels, shops, restaurants, and cafes line both sides, and the street has a cosmopolitan atmosphere that belies the town's remote mountain location.
Davos owes its original fame not to skiing or diplomacy but to medicine. In the 1860s, the German doctor Alexander Spengler discovered that the dry, high-altitude air of the Davos valley was beneficial for tuberculosis patients. His findings, published in 1869, transformed Davos from a small farming community into the most important tuberculosis treatment centre in Europe. Sanatoriums sprang up along the valley, attracting patients from across the continent.
Among those who came to Davos for a cure was Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent the winter of 1881-1882 here. Arthur Conan Doyle also visited and wrote about the town. But the most famous literary work inspired by the Davos sanatorium experience is Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, published in 1924. Mann visited his wife Katia at the Waldsanatorium in Davos in 1912, and that three-week visit grew into one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a vast meditation on time, illness, death, and European civilization set in a sanatorium high in the mountains.
Walk north along the Promenade. The mountains rise on both sides of the valley.
Stop 2: Kirchner Museum
Continue north along the Promenade to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Platz. The museum is on the right.
The Kirchner Museum, opened in 1992, is dedicated to the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founding members of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke and one of the most important painters of the early twentieth century. The museum holds the world's largest collection of Kirchner's work, with over 1,500 pieces including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures.
Kirchner came to Davos in 1917, physically and psychologically shattered by his experiences in World War I. He had suffered a breakdown during military service and was addicted to the morphine and veronal prescribed for his condition. The mountain air and the Alpine landscape gradually restored him, and Davos became his home and his primary subject for the remaining two decades of his life.
In Davos, Kirchner's style evolved dramatically. The angular, frenetic cityscapes of his Berlin years gave way to sweeping, rhythmic compositions inspired by the mountain landscape, the farmers, and the traditional life of the valley. His Davos paintings are filled with movement, colour, and a dynamic energy that captures the drama of the Alpine world. The paintings of local peasants and mountain scenes are among his finest works.
Kirchner's life ended tragically. Classified as a degenerate artist by the Nazi regime in 1937, with over 600 of his works confiscated from German museums, he fell into deep despair and took his own life in Frauenkirch, near Davos, on June 15, 1938. He is buried in the Waldfriedhof, the forest cemetery, on the outskirts of Davos.
The museum building, designed by the Zurich architects Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer, is a clean, minimalist structure of glass and concrete that provides an ideal setting for the vivid colours of Kirchner's work. The natural light flooding through the glass walls echoes the Alpine luminosity that Kirchner sought to capture.
From the museum, continue north along the Promenade toward the Congress Centre.
Stop 3: The Congress Centre (Kongresszentrum)
Continue north to the Kongresszentrum, the large modern building on the Promenade.
The Davos Congress Centre is the building that transformed this Alpine town into a household name worldwide. Every January since 1971, the World Economic Forum has held its annual meeting here, bringing together heads of state, business leaders, academics, and journalists for a week of discussions about the global economy, geopolitics, and the future of humanity.
The WEF was founded by Klaus Schwab, a German-born Swiss economist and professor, who organised the first European Management Forum in Davos in January 1971. The event was initially a modest academic conference on modern management techniques, but it grew rapidly in scope and ambition. By the 1980s, it had become a major platform for international diplomacy and business networking, and today it is arguably the most influential gathering of its kind in the world.
The choice of Davos as the permanent home of the WEF was not accidental. Schwab was attracted by the same qualities that had drawn tuberculosis patients a century earlier: the isolation, the clean air, the sense of being removed from the everyday world. The mountain setting, he felt, would encourage more open and creative thinking than a conventional city venue.
During the annual meeting, the Promenade is transformed. Security is intense, with Swiss army personnel and police controlling access to the Congress Centre zone. World leaders arrive by helicopter, and the hotels charge rates that would make even a St. Moritz concierge blush. But for the rest of the year, the Congress Centre serves a more modest purpose, hosting regional events, concerts, and conferences.
Continue north, passing through the town toward Davos Dorf.
Stop 4: The Alte Kirche St. Johann (Old Church of St. John)
Walk to the area between Davos Platz and Davos Dorf. The church is on the right side of the road.
The Alte Kirche St. Johann, the Old Church of St. John, is the oldest church in Davos and one of the few surviving medieval buildings in the town. Dating from the fourteenth century, this small, simple church with its distinctive onion-domed tower sits quietly amid the more modern buildings of the valley, a reminder that Davos was a Walser farming settlement for centuries before it became a sanatorium town or an international conference venue.
The Walser were a German-speaking people who migrated from the Valais region of southwestern Switzerland into the high valleys of Graubünden, Vorarlberg, and northern Italy beginning in the thirteenth century. They were skilled at farming in extreme mountain conditions and established communities in some of the highest inhabited valleys in the Alps. Davos was one of their most important settlements, and the local dialect retains Walser influences to this day.
The church interior is modest but atmospheric, with a painted wooden ceiling and simple Gothic windows. The churchyard contains gravestones spanning several centuries, offering a quiet genealogy of the valley's families.
From the church, walk toward the Davosersee, the lake at the edge of town.
Stop 5: Davosersee (Davos Lake)
Walk to the shores of the Davosersee, the small lake at the northeastern end of Davos Platz.
The Davosersee is a small, serene Alpine lake that sits at the northeastern edge of the town. In summer, its shores are popular for walking and picnicking, and the reflections of the surrounding mountains on its still surface are beautiful. In winter, when the lake freezes, it is used for ice skating and curling.
Davos has a remarkable sporting heritage beyond the WEF. The town claims to be the birthplace of Alpine skiing as a sport. In 1865, the first skiing competitions were held here, and by the early twentieth century Davos was one of the premier ski resorts in the Alps. The Parsenn ski area, accessible by the funicular from Davos Dorf, is one of the largest and most varied in Switzerland, with runs descending all the way to the village of Küblis in the Prättigau valley, a vertical drop of nearly 2,000 metres.
The town also hosts the Spengler Cup, the oldest invitational ice hockey tournament in the world, held annually since 1923 during the Christmas holiday week. Named after the same Dr. Alexander Spengler who first promoted Davos as a health resort, the tournament attracts top European club teams and a Canadian national team selection, and it fills the Davos ice rink with passionate fans during the festive season.
From the lake, you can see the mountains rising on all sides. The Weissfluhjoch, at 2,662 metres, is the site of the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, known as the SLF, one of the world's leading centres for the study of snow, avalanches, and mountain hazards. The research conducted here has saved countless lives by improving avalanche prediction and prevention techniques.
Stop 6: The Schatzalp and Thomas Mann's Mountain
For those with time, take the Schatzalpbahn funicular from Davos Platz up to the Schatzalp, at 1,861 metres.
The Schatzalp is a high terrace above Davos that offers panoramic views and a direct connection to the literary world of Thomas Mann. The Schatzalp Hotel, a grand building perched on the mountainside, was originally the Berghotel Schatzalp, a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients that opened in 1900. It is widely believed to be the model for the Berghof sanatorium in The Magic Mountain.
Mann's novel follows Hans Castorp, a young Hamburg engineer who visits his cousin at a sanatorium in the mountains and stays for seven years, seduced by the rarefied atmosphere, the intellectual conversations, and the strange distortion of time that occurs at altitude. The novel is both a portrait of pre-war European society and a meditation on the human condition, and it remains one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century literature.
The Schatzalp today is a hotel and a botanical garden, the Alpinum Schatzalp, which houses an extraordinary collection of alpine and high-altitude plants from around the world. In winter, you can toboggan back down to Davos on a dedicated sledging run, a thrilling descent through the forest.
Stop 7: Return to the Promenade
Return to the Promenade in Davos Platz for a final walk.
Back on the Promenade, take a moment to appreciate the full sweep of Davos's story. This is a town that reinvented itself three times: first as a Walser farming community, then as the world's most famous tuberculosis sanatorium, and finally as an international conference centre and winter sports resort.
The clean mountain air that drew the first patients in the 1860s remains one of Davos's great assets. The climate is continental and dry, with cold winters and mild summers, and the sun shines with an intensity enhanced by the altitude. The air quality monitoring stations in the valley consistently record some of the cleanest air in Europe.
Closing Narration
Our walking tour of Davos has taken you along the Promenade where kings and economists walk, past the museum of a tortured genius, by the Congress Centre where the world's future is debated, and to the shores of an Alpine lake surrounded by peaks where pioneering snow science is conducted.
Davos is a town of layers and surprises. Beneath the headlines about the WEF lies a rich cultural history, from Thomas Mann's fictional sanatorium to Kirchner's vibrant mountain paintings. Beneath the ski runs lies a centuries-old farming culture. And beneath the cosmopolitan surface lies a mountain community that still measures the year by the seasons, the snowfall, and the light.
Ride the Parsenn funicular to the summit. Walk the Philosophenweg, the Philosopher's Path, through the forest. Attend the Spengler Cup if you are here at Christmas. And remember that the air you are breathing has been considered therapeutic for over 150 years, so take a deep breath and let this remarkable town work its quiet magic.
Thank you for joining this ch.tours walking tour of Davos. We look forward to guiding you again.