Sion

Sion sits in the middle of the Rhône valley with two abrupt rock hills rising out of the flat floor, each carrying a building. It is the capital of the Valais, the canton that runs from Lake Geneva up to the Matterhorn, and it is the driest and sunniest part of Switzerland — so dry that the valley has been irrigated for six hundred years by bisses, wooden channels carrying meltwater along the mountainsides.

The two hills

Valère, the eastern hill, carries a fortified church — a basilica inside a wall, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the cathedral chapter, and remarkably intact.

Inside it is the thing to come for: the oldest playable organ in the world, built around 1435, with its original painted shutters and a good part of its original pipework. It is still played — there is a festival of ancient organ music every summer Saturday in July and August — and hearing an instrument nearly six hundred years old is not an experience available anywhere else.

Tourbillon, the western hill, is a bishop’s castle from 1294, burned in 1788 and left as a ruin. It is a steeper climb, free, and the view down the Rhône valley from it explains why anyone built here.

Doing both takes about two hours with the climbs.

The town

Between the hills, a small old town of stone and arcades: the Hôtel de Ville with a Roman inscription set into its wall, the Sorcerers’ Tower, and a cathedral rebuilt over an early Christian church.

The Musée d’histoire on Valère covers the valley from prehistory, and the Musée d’art holds Valais painting.

Wine

The Valais makes about a third of all Swiss wine, more than any other canton, and Sion is in the middle of it. The whites are Fendant — Chasselas under its Valais name — and Petite Arvine, an indigenous grape grown almost nowhere else, dry and saline and worth seeking out. The main red is Dôle, a blend of Pinot Noir and Gamay.

Some of the vineyards above the town are on terraces so steep they are worked with monorails.

Getting there

• By train — Geneva about an hour and a half, Lausanne an hour, Zurich about three hours via Bern.
• On the way to Zermatt — Sion is on the same line, and a two-hour stop here breaks the journey well.
• On foot — both hills are fifteen minutes from the station.

Nearby

• Sierre and Salgesch — twenty minutes east, with a wine museum split between two villages and a marked path through the vineyards between them
• The bisses — several of the old irrigation channels have footpaths beside them, level and shaded, and they are among the best easy walks in Switzerland
• Crans-Montana and Anzère — the resorts on the sunny north side
• Leukerbad — thermal baths under a cliff, forty minutes away

When to go

Spring and autumn, when the valley is not baking — Sion regularly records the highest temperatures in Switzerland in summer. The organ concerts run July and August; the wine harvest is late September and October, and the whole valley turns out for it.