Hotel Belvédère was erected in 1882 on the hairpin curves of the Furka Pass by young hotelier Josef Seiler. It is one of Switzerland’s snowiest areas. The renowned abandoned Hotel Belvédère was situated on the edge of the Rhone Glacier and attracted a lavish clientele that sometimes stayed for weeks during the summer. Once upon a time, the Belvédère Hotel was a posh hangout for celebrities and nobility.
The fabled Swiss mountain route known as Furka Pass rose to fame with the release of the James Bond movie Goldfinger. James Bond drove his Aston Martin by the Belvédère in 1965, and the image is featured on postcards and has gone viral on social media. It is now unsafe to build the ice tunnel into the glacier, which was once a spectacular spectacle that drew thousands of visitors, including celebrities like Sean Connery and Pope John XXIII.
Trips to the area were designed as multi-day trips with an overnight stay in the 1920s, but with the advent of private transport, these became one-day round trips. Ultimately, the automobile ensured that fewer and fewer travelers stayed at hotels in the area, and the Belvédère was also affected.
The Swiss hotel industry flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, and Hotel Belvédère’s reputation grew with the opening of new railway lines. But starting in the 1960s, higher-powered and quicker cars reduced the number of visitors to the hotel and other Alpine hotels; overnight stays were no longer offered, and the two- or three-day trips through the pass were reduced to one day.
The Carlen family from Brig in Canton Valais purchased the hotel in 1988, and subsequently, Philipp and Rosmarie Carlen ran the business, but the burden required to conserve the historic structure was too much for them, and they split up in 2015. The hotel closed a few years ago, and it is unlikely to reopen. The Rhone Glacier, one of the major attractions, surrounds the area and provides the best views of the Bernese and Valais Alps.
Joseph Seiler had the Hotel Belvédère enlarged numerous times in response to great demand, and at the height of the Belle Époque era, it could house up to ninety people. It was the heyday of the hotel business, with the number of hotels in Valais alone tripling in only thirty years, from 79 in 1880 to 321 shortly before the First World War.
The difficulties of operating a hotel in such a harsh environment were one of the challenges of running a business in the high Alps. Because in every winter, they had to close the water pipes and electricity, hibernate the building, and move everything that would not withstand the severe weather. When spring arrived, they had to fly in with a helicopter to prepare for the season, even though the road leading to the hotel was still closed.
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