The miraculous resurrection of Canada’s Edelweiss Village

On the brink of demolition, a group of Swiss-style chalets in the Canadian Rocky Mountains has been given a new lease of life. SWI swissinfo.ch visits a Swiss heritage site that is full of stories. Yellow hiking trail signs point the way to a handful of chalets; little Swiss flags flutter in the wind. In the background, dense forests and rocky mountain peaks pierce through low-hanging clouds. Anyone entering the “Edelweiss Village” might fancy they are in a Swiss mountain village. However, the small settlement is neither in Valais nor in the Bernese Oberland, but 8,000km away in Golden, in the middle of western Canada’s Rocky Mountains. This is where numerous Swiss mountain guides and their families found a new home more than 125 years ago and left their mark. The first to come from Switzerland was Peter Sarbach in 1897, whose successful mountain tours with tourists made the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) recognise the value of professional Swiss mountain guides. The CPR ...