Bernina-Tour

The Bernina Tour consists of five stages. The first section starts at the railway station in Poschiavo. The village's Italian character features stone-roofed patrician houses, narrow cobbled alleys, spacious market squares and beautifully decorated church buildings. The so-called "Spaniolenviertel" (Spanish quarter) on the village's southern edge boasts luxurious palazzos of confectioners who had made their fortunes abroad.

Passing the last residential buildings, you cross the tracks of the Rhaetian Railway for the first time. The Bernina line connects St. Moritz with Tirano (Italy) via the Bernina Pass and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. With a gradient of up to seven per cent, it is one of the steepest railways in the world to manage the incline without cogwheels.

Alternating between trails and gravel roads, you slowly climb higher. When crossing the Varunasch, the road turns into a path that briefly follows the mountain stream. Horse pastures give way to the forest here. Like the Rhaetian Railway, the forest trail uses serpentines to make the gradient more manageable. The railway line is crossed several times.

Stone walls fortify the steep, agriculturally cultivated slopes and indicate the boundaries of the pastures. The trail continues on a stony forest path through the light pine forest past large boulders towards Piz Campasc. The views of the wooded slopes, the opposite peaks and the flat valley floor are magnificent, reaching as far as Lago di Poschiavo to the south.

The railway line, the Cavagliasch mountain stream and the hiking trail come together where the valley narrows and lead through the Cavaglia gorge. Here you can descend into the glacier garden and admire the millennia-old huge holes in the rock. The intense, constant pressure of the glacier water with rotating stones and sand has created the so-called "Cooking Pots of the Giants".

Upstream, you reach the southeastern end of the Cavaglia plain. The stony streambed of the Cavagliasch divides the pastures in the broad valley. Ancient forests flank the meadows on the plain. Following the railway line, you reach Cavaglia. The former workers' village around the local hydroelectric power station is now a holiday resort with a handful of residential buildings.

A forest path continues through the rocky landscape of the Asciai de Palü gorge. Many small dry-stone walls line the path up to Lagh da Palü. The reservoir lies surrounded by Sassal Mason, Piz Caral, Piz Canton and Curnasel. A narrow path zigzags partly past steep rock faces up to Alp Grüm with its restaurant. From the sun terrace, sweeping views extend from the Bernina massif to the sun-kissed Val Poschiavo, stretching all the way into Italy.

On a wide gravel path, the route continues through stony grasslands towards Lago Bianco. After the dam, the trail leads directly along the shore of the whitish lake. A short time later, you reach the stage's endpoint at the Ospizio Bernina station. At an altitude of 2,253 metres, it is the highest station of the Rhaetian Railway.