Hotel Belvédère — Furka Pass

The Furka Pass road was opened between 1866 and 1867, connecting the Valais valley to the canton of Uri through the high Swiss Alps at 2,429 metres above sea level. In 1882, Alexander Seiler — owner of the Grand Hotel Glacier du Rhône — built a lodge for his son in a hairpin bend on the pass road. The Rhône Glacier was a few hundred metres from the front door. Guests came to see the ice. A second expansion in 1890 added the gable roof and upper floors that gave the Hotel Belvédère its current silhouette. By 1903, it had become a Belle Époque destination with panoramic views of the glacier and the valley below.

The hotel’s first golden age came with the arrival of the postal bus in 1921 and two new railway lines — the Furka Oberalp Railway and the Glacier Express — in 1930. Its second came after World War II, when the personal automobile turned the Furka Pass into one of the most famous driving roads in Europe. The hotel welcomed Pope John XXIII and Sean Connery among its guests. Connery became a regular, and when the producers of Goldfinger needed a location for the pursuit of Auric Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce by Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, it was Connery who insisted on the Furka Pass. The film was shot there in July 1964. A curve on the east side of the pass was renamed James Bond Strasse.

The decline began with the opening of the Furka Base Tunnel in 1982. Traffic that had previously crossed the pass now bypassed it entirely, removing the commercial foundation of every hotel on the route. The Rhône Glacier, meanwhile, was retreating — ten centimetres per day, year after year. The ice grotto that had drawn tourists since the 1870s became unsafe. The glacier that had once reached the hotel’s doorstep withdrew until it was barely visible from the pass road. The hotel closed for the first time in 1980, reopened in 1990, and closed permanently in 2016. Today its windows are boarded, its doors barricaded, and the Rhône Glacier is covered in UV-resistant fleece blankets to slow the melt.

The Furka Pass remains one of the most iconic mountain roads in the world. It is open from approximately June to mid-October, depending on weather. The Hotel Belvédère still stands in its hairpin bend — closed, empty, its mansard roof and stone facade unchanged, its panoramic restaurant stacked with chairs, its grandfather clock stopped at quarter to three. Visitors still pull over to photograph it. The NZZ called it the most recognisable abandoned building in Switzerland. The cover of the bestselling book Accidentally Wes Anderson features the hotel’s frontage. Red Bull filmed drivers drifting around it; the video went viral.

This photograph captures the Hotel Belvédère at night, using a long exposure to trace the headlights and tail lights of a passing car around the hairpin. The light trails arc through the darkness while the hotel stands motionless between the road and the sky. Above, the Milky Way is visible in its entirety — a clarity of sky only possible at 2,400 metres, far from any light pollution. On aluminium, the night sky gains a depth and luminosity that paper cannot achieve. The stars register as points of light on a metallic surface. The car’s trace of speed becomes a line drawn across the mountain. The hotel remains.