Tarasp and the Lower Engadin

Tarasp is a white castle standing on a rock above the Inn valley in the Lower Engadin, in the far east of Switzerland, and it is the emblem of one of the country’s least-visited and most distinctive corners.

This is Romansh country — the fourth national language, descended directly from the Latin of the Roman province, spoken by a few tens of thousands of people and nowhere more so than in these valleys.

The castle

Built in the eleventh century, held by Austria for four hundred years, and bought in 1900 by a German mouthwash manufacturer named Karl Lingner, who restored it thoroughly and installed an organ.

Since 2016 it has belonged to the artist Not Vital, who opened it to visitors and installed contemporary art in the rooms — which is either the making of the place or an imposition on it, depending on who you ask locally.

Guided tours run in season; the castle is visible from the whole valley and is worth the drive up even if it is shut.

The sgraffito villages

The reason to spend a day here rather than an hour.

Engadin houses are built thick-walled against the winter, with deep funnel-shaped window recesses, and decorated with sgraffito — patterns scratched through white lime plaster to a darker layer beneath. Rosettes, scrolls, dates, mottoes in Romansh across the fronts.

Guarda is the best of them and is a protected site; Ardez, Ftan and Sent are close behind. All are on the same short stretch of valley, all reachable by post bus, and none takes more than an hour to walk round.

Scuol and the water

Scuol, the main village, sits on around twenty mineral springs, and the water has been drunk and bathed in since the sixteenth century. Several public fountains in the village run mineral water you can taste — each with a different mineral content, and most of them frankly unpleasant, which was taken as evidence they worked.

Bogn Engiadina is the modern bath complex, with an Irish-Roman circuit done over about two hours; see thermal baths.

The National Park

Half an hour up the valley is the Swiss National Park, founded in 1914 and the oldest in the Alps. It is also the strictest: nothing is managed, nothing is planted, nothing is culled, and visitors must stay on the marked paths. No dogs, no camping, no leaving the trail at all.

The result is genuinely wild forest and high pasture with red deer, ibex, chamois, marmots and bearded vultures, reintroduced here in the 1990s. The visitor centre at Zernez explains the rules and lends binoculars.

Getting there

• By train — Zurich about three and a half hours via Chur and the Vereina tunnel, or over the Albula. This is the far end of the country and the journey is long by Swiss standards.
• The Bernina Express and Glacier Express both run through Graubünden, and St. Moritz is an hour and a half up the Engadin.
• By post bus between the villages, on the ordinary ticket.

When to go

June to October for walking and the park, which is open roughly June to November and closed by snow the rest of the year.

Winter for cross-country skiing — the Engadin has the best network in Switzerland, and the Engadin Ski Marathon in March draws 13,000 people.

The valley is high, dry and sunny, and it has the largest temperature swings in Switzerland: hot afternoons and cold nights, even in summer.