Village

Saas Fee / Village

Saas Fee's rural origins are still evident in the old chalets and storehouses; the car-free streets help preserve the ambience.

Before the advent of tourism, Saas Fee’s inhabitants were subsistence farmers who, for extra cash, would harvest ice from the glaciers, delivering it to the hotels in the valley and beyond. The village’s rural origins are still evident in the old chalets and storehouses, called ‘Stadel’, perched on stone mushrooms to keep the rats at bay. The car-free streets help preserve the ambience, even if the locals are now to be found fleecing tourists rather than sheep.

A priest, Johann Josef, brought the first British alpinists to town in the mid 1800s and established Saas Fee’s future. The Hotel Dom was the first to be built and in 1849 Josef made skis with which to descend to Saas Grund. There was no looking back, other than to his statue in the town square.

The road to Saas Fee was only built in the 1950s, before which it was a donkey track. The builders wisely decided to end the road with a big car park from where it’s an easy walk, with luggage on a trolley or hotel’s electric cart, to the centre, making this one of the Alps’ easiest traffic-free resorts to negotiate. Heading left (south) takes you down towards the base area with a mix of hotels, après-ski bars and ski shops; to the right, in the northern half of town, are more hotels and chalets as well as restaurants and bars. Three bus routes run to the ski lifts. Though the village is not big, the many places with ski and boot storage near the base station come in handy for people staying at the far end of the village, allowing them a more comfortable commute to the lifts.

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