Page 138 - WINE DINE AND TRAVEL SUMMER 2024 LIMA

Rich and famous visitors

The rise to the status of a spa town began
in 1840 when the 97.7 Fahrenheit thermal
water of the Tamina spring was piped for
the first time from the Tamina Gorge 2.5
miles out of the valley to the Ragaz farm.
Famous bathers such as Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Victor Hugo
subsequently paid their respects to the
former farming village. It was also the re‐
treat where the Bohemian-Austrian poet
and author Rainer Maria Rilke reputedly
wrote part of his poetic work the Duineser
Elegien towards the end of his life, in par‐
ticular, the seventh Elegy with its famous
lines “Hiersein ist herrlich... (To be here is
splendid)”.
With the increase in tourism, luxury hotels
were built to accommodate wealthy travel‐
ers, including Russian nobility. The ties with
Russia were in part thanks to Bernhard Simon,
a Swiss architect, who lived in St. Petersburg
from 1839 to 1853. Born in 1816 as the son of
a small farmer and cobbler from Glarus, at
a time when there was no academically reg‐
ulated architectural training in Switzerland,
he acquired his knowledge in Lausanne,
where his uncle was a building inspector. In
the 1830s he took over the construction man‐
agement of the "Gibbon" hotel and the "Ko‐
rnhaus", after which he moved to Paris, then
to Russia. Being a talented architect, he com‐
pleted many construction projects for the
Russian nobility and the tsar family such as
the reconstruction of the renowned Shuvalov
palace (headquarters of the Fabergé muse‐
ums since 2013).

Alte Rathaus (old town hall
Left: Altes Bad Pfäfers
Opposite: Tamina Gorge in Bad
Ragaz copyright Heidiland Tourismus

138 WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE SUMMER 2024