00 / OPENING
I am sitting in a flower garden with a coffee. Behind me stands a granite hotel with red shutters. Below the terrace, visitors follow a guide across the new Spitallamm dam and look down towards its predecessor, now caught between concrete and water. Above us, motorcycles climb towards the pass, their engines moving across the rock.
The hotel, the dams and almost everything visible from this table belong to Kraftwerke Oberhasli.
The arrangement began in 1932. That year, the original dam was completed and the Grimsel Hospiz opened as the first electrically heated hotel in Europe. One held back 90 million cubic metres of water. The other demonstrated what that water could provide.
Nearly a century later, a second dam stands in front of the first. Switzerland is experiencing severe drought, its reservoirs have fallen unusually low and the glaciers feeding this system continue to retreat.
The hotel still serves coffee.
The alpine calendar around it is becoming less reliable.
FIG.002 / DAM
01 / THE ALPINE CALENDAR
For most of modern Swiss history, hydropower followed a dependable rhythm.
Snow accumulated during winter. Glaciers held water in the mountains long after the weather became warmer. Spring and summer released it gradually into rivers and reservoirs, where it could be stored until electricity was needed.
The system turned an entire landscape into a form of infrastructure.
That rhythm is changing. Snow arrives later and melts earlier. Glaciers release more water as they retreat, but every summer leaves less ice behind for the next. By the end of the century, summer runoff in parts of the Alps could fall by almost half.
In the summer of 2026, after a dry winter and spring, Swiss reservoirs reached their lowest seasonal level in two decades.
Grimsel sits close to the centre of this problem. Its lakes collect water from snow, rain and some of the largest remaining glaciers in the Alps. Tunnels move it between reservoirs. Turbines turn its descent towards the valleys into electricity.
When I arrive on the motorcycle, none of that movement is obvious. The Grimselsee lies below me, pale and still between the granite walls.
Before the reservoir, there was a valley here.
For centuries, travellers crossed it on their way between the Bernese Oberland and northern Italy. Mule trains carried cheese and cattle south, then returned with wine, rice and other goods from across the Alps. The Grimsel Pass was part of a working route through terrain that could become lethal without warning.
The first recorded hospice stood down in that valley. Mentioned as early as 1142, it provided food, shelter and a chance of surviving the weather before travellers continued across the pass.
Its foundations remain there today, beneath the surface of the reservoir.
When Switzerland began constructing the Grimsel power system in the 1920s, the valley, the route and the old hospice had to disappear.
A new hotel was built higher on the rock.
This time, it came with electricity.
FIG.003 /
FIG.004 / VALLEY
PROJECT / GRIMSEL HOSPIZ
LOCATION / GRIMSEL NOLLEN, GUTTANNEN, SWITZERLAND
ALTITUDE / 1,980 M A.S.L.
TYPOLOGY / HISTORIC ALPINE HOTEL
FIRST RECORDED HOSPICE / 1142
CURRENT BUILDING / 1932
ARCHITECT / JACQUES WIPF
CLIENT + OPERATOR / KRAFTWERKE OBERHASLI AG
ORIGINAL PROGRAMME / WORKERS’ ACCOMMODATION + HOTEL
RENOVATION / 2008–2010
RENOVATION ARCHITECT / ANDRIN SCHWEIZER
ROOMS / 28
PRIMARY MATERIALS / LOCAL GRANITE + TIMBER
ENERGY / ELECTRIC HEATING 1932 + WASTE-HEAT RECOVERY TODAY
STATUS / OPERATIONAL HISTORIC FOUR-STAR HOTEL
02 / THE ELECTRIC HOSPICE
In 1932, electricity at Grimsel was more than a service. It was the reason the new landscape existed.
For seven years, hundreds of workers had drilled tunnels through granite, diverted water and poured concrete into the narrow Spitallamm gorge. The original hospice became accommodation for around 500 of them. Its dining rooms operated as canteens until the rising reservoir forced the building to close.
The replacement stood safely above the water on the Grimsel Nollen.
Designed by Swiss architect Jacques Wipf, the new Hospiz belonged to the same architectural family as the power stations and service buildings appearing throughout the region. Rough local granite covered the exterior. Red shutters and a steep roof gave the heavy structure the recognisable outline it still carries today.
Inside, the experience was radically different.
Guests arrived in one of the most exposed landscapes in Switzerland and found electric light, hot meals and rooms heated without stoves. The Grimsel Hospiz became the first electrically heated hotel in Europe.
Today, that description sounds almost ordinary. In 1932, it was a display of technological confidence.
Electric heating allowed a large hotel to operate beside a reservoir at almost 2,000 metres without carrying fuel across the pass or maintaining fires throughout the building. Warm rooms became part of the infrastructure.
The old hospice had offered essential shelter to travellers. Its replacement turned that inherited responsibility into a modern hotel.
The exterior remained severe. Inside were timber rooms, prepared tables, wine and controlled warmth. Guests could experience the weather and isolation of Grimsel without being entirely exposed to either.
For the visitors arriving in the 1930s, this was an extraordinary kind of luxury. The same water held behind the new dam supplied the electricity that illuminated and heated the hotel above it.
At Grimsel, hospitality had become part of the power system.
FIG.005 / GRIMSEL HOSPIZ / GRANITE EXTERIOR
FIG.006 / GRIMSEL HOSPIZ / HISTORIC INTERIOR
FIG.007 / GARDEN TERRACE / FIELD OBSERVATION
03 / THE SECOND WALL
The new Spitallamm dam stands directly in front of the original.
Construction began in 2019 and finished in 2025. Over six alpine building seasons, workers placed around 220,000 cubic metres of concrete into the gorge. The result is a double-curved wall rising 113 metres from its foundation, almost exactly the height of its predecessor.
The old dam remains behind it.
Demolishing a structure of that scale would have created another major engineering project and removed an important piece of Swiss industrial history. Instead, the original wall stays in place. Water fills the narrow space between the two structures and equalises the pressure on the older concrete.
From the hotel, visitors can join guided tours across the dams. They walk along the crest, look into the gap and photograph two generations of hydropower occupying the same gorge.
I watch them from above. Against the scale of the walls, people become small moving points on the concrete.
The replacement secures the existing reservoir, but it has also been designed for a larger one. KWO plans to raise both the new Spitallamm dam and the Seeuferegg wall by 23 metres. The proposal would increase the capacity of the Grimselsee from around 90 to 170 million cubic metres and almost double the energy stored in its water.
That additional volume is intended mainly for winter.
Most water currently enters the Grimsel system during summer, when solar power is plentiful and electricity demand is lower. A larger reservoir would hold more of it until the months when Switzerland depends heavily on imported energy.
The future of hydropower here requires more concrete, more storage and a greater ability to manage when the water is used.
From the garden, both dams are visible at once: the system completed in 1932 and the new wall built to carry it into a less predictable century.
FIG.008 / SPITALLAMM / OLD + NEW DAM WALLS
SYSTEM / GRIMSEL HYDROPOWER
OPERATOR / KRAFTWERKE OBERHASLI AG
RESERVOIR / GRIMSELSEE
CURRENT STORAGE / APPROX. 94 MILLION M³
ORIGINAL SPITALLAMM DAM / 1925–1932
ORIGINAL HEIGHT / 114 M
REPLACEMENT DAM / 2019–2025
REPLACEMENT HEIGHT / 113 M
TYPE / DOUBLE-CURVED ARCH DAM
CONCRETE / APPROX. 220,000 M³
PROPOSED RAISING / +23 M
PROPOSED STORAGE / APPROX. 170 MILLION M³
PURPOSE / WINTER STORAGE + GRID FLEXIBILITY
04 / FIELD REFLECTION
I finish the coffee and pack the camera away.
Around me, the garden continues its routine. Guests take their seats. Another guided group walks towards the dam. Motorcycles pass above the hotel, crossing a route that once required pack animals, shelter and a favourable change in the weather.
Grimsel no longer feels like an outpost.
The road is paved. The rooms are warm. Electricity, food and clean sheets reach a granite island that travellers once approached with genuine uncertainty. An extreme environment has become an easy stop between two mountain passes.
That ease is the result of everything surrounding me.
The hospice beneath the lake, the hotel on the rock, the tunnels, the old dam and the new wall record successive attempts to make this landscape predictable. Each generation inherited the same granite and found a more comfortable way through it.
I put on my helmet and return to the motorcycle.
What once demanded survival now fits inside a morning coffee.
FIG.009 / OLD DAM
