HOW A PEASANT VILLAGE ROSE UP
“The great majority of tourists visit Switzerland between the middle of July and the end of September,” observed Baedeker’s Guide to Switzerland in 1895, adding that if one were of a botanical bent and wished to “see the scenery, the vegetation, and particularly the Alpine flowers in perfection, June is recommended as the most charming month in the year”.
The quaint tone of voice evokes the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, men in tweed knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and women sensibly attired in bonnets and walking skirts, their corseted waists in inverse proportion to their billowing leg o’ mutton sleeves, striding across sunlit Alpine meadows taking lungfuls of crisp Swiss air and surveying distant snow-capped peaks. Baedeker’s 1895 guide to Switzerland ran to 500 densely printed pages of advice, pull-out maps, hotel prices, itineraries, railway timetables, and so forth: in short, everything the late Victorian traveller could have wanted… unless they happened to be planning a trip to Gstaad.
For a start, Baedeker spelled it Gstad, and gave it a mention for which the word ‘fleeting’ implies way too much detail. Skip a line on page 250 and you would never have known the place existed: it is mentioned only once, and only then inasmuch as it found itself “at the mouth of the Lauenen-Thal”. That is it. And so, guided by Baedeker, those Henry James and Edith Wharton characters would have passed unheeding through what would become one of the world’s most famous resorts, heading instead for the picturesque Lauenensee, there to pick and press alpine flowers or sketch the lakeside landscape. If anything, the “finely situated” and almost homonymous village of Gsteig was the local tourist hub.
To be fair to Baedeker there was not much to detain its readers in Gstaad. A photograph from around 1895 shows a scattering of wood-sided houses and farm buildings, along with huge, geometrically exact (this was
