Crans-Montana Has Hosted More Foreign Ministers Than Ski Photographers

Crans-Montana sits on a broad, unusually sunny plateau above the Rhône Valley in Switzerland's Valais canton. Crans and Montana grew up as two separate villages before being marketed and, eventually, thought of as a single resort, one that has spent more than a century drawing a wealthier, quieter crowd than its Alpine profile might suggest.

A sanatorium town before it was a ski town

Like Davos, Crans-Montana's first wave of wealthy visitors came for their health rather than the skiing. The plateau's unusually high number of clear, sunny days made it a fashionable base for tuberculosis sanatoria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing an international, moneyed clientele decades before a chairlift went up.

The golf course that never left

The Golf Club Crans-sur-Sierre has hosted the Omega European Masters, one of the European Tour's oldest continuously played events, since 1939, with interruptions only for the Second World War. The tournament's decades-long residency at a single course is unusual on the modern tour and has made the club itself as much of a draw as the resort's skiing.

A forum, not a festival

Since 1986, the resort has hosted the Crans Montana Forum, a private, invitation-only gathering of heads of state, ministers and business leaders held to discuss global economic and political issues, run with a far lower public profile than Davos's World Economic Forum. It is the kind of fixture that explains why the resort's standing among the old-money and diplomatic set has rarely needed a red carpet to sustain it.

The view that sells the rest

The resort's south-facing plateau looks directly across the Rhône Valley to the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and the Weisshorn on a clear day, a panorama that has made Crans-Montana's terraces as much of a draw in summer, for golf, hiking and simply sitting with the view, as its slopes are in winter.

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Traveller tips

• Crans-Montana is reached by funicular from Sierre, on the Rhône Valley rail line, rather than by a direct mainline station of its own.
• The resort's summer season, built around golf, hiking and the plateau's lakes, runs on a very different calendar to its winter one; check what is actually open before booking either.
• The Golf Club Crans-sur-Sierre is a private club with restricted public access during tournament weeks; confirm play availability well ahead of a visit.
• Sunshine-hour claims for the resort vary by source; treat any specific figure as indicative rather than exact.