Parc Naziunal Svizzer
Switzerland's only national park — the Alps' first, a strict wilderness of dolomite and mountain pine above the Engadine, watched by science since 1914.
The Swiss National Park — Schweizerischer Nationalpark in German, Parc Naziunal Svizzer in the Romansh of every commune it touches — opened on 1 August 1914, the Swiss national day, and was the first national park in the Alps. It began as a scientific wager: the Basel naturalists around Paul and Fritz Sarasin, with the Engadine schoolteacher Steivan Brunies, leased the remote Val Cluozza from the commune of Zernez and proposed a "total reserve" where nature would be left entirely to itself and simply observed. That wager has now run for over a century without interruption, which makes the park one of the longest-running ecological experiments anywhere. It is still the country's only national park — proposals for a second, Parc Adula in 2016 and a Locarnese park in 2018, both died at the communal ballot — and it is the rare national park anywhere classified as a strict nature reserve, IUCN's most severe category.
The park covers some 170 square kilometres of the Lower Engadine between Zernez, the Ofen Pass road and the Italian border above the Livigno reservoir — dolomite and limestone country, scree-streaked, culminating in Piz Quattervals at 3,165 metres. The Pass dal Fuorn road threads it from Zernez to the Val Müstair, through the God dal Fuorn, mountain-pine forest that has not heard an axe since before the park existed; the solitary inn at Il Fuorn predates the park by centuries. Above Lavin, and joined to the rest only on the map, lies Macun — a high cirque holding two dozen tarns, annexed in 2000 as the park's single enlargement. Beyond the boundaries the protection keeps going: the Biosfera Val Müstair adjoins to the east, forming a UNESCO biosphere reserve with the park, and Italy's Stelvio National Park picks up across the border.
The regime is the point. Visitors stay on the marked trails — 21 routes, about a hundred kilometres — rest only at the designated spots, and bring no dog, light no fire, pitch no tent, take nothing home; wardens patrol, and the fines are real. From the first snow to the melt the trail network simply closes, and the park spends half of each year alone. The animals have noticed: some two thousand red deer summer in the park — a species that had been wiped out of Graubünden in the nineteenth century and walked back in on its own — alongside ibex, reintroduced from 1920, chamois everywhere, and marmots that whistle across every scree field. At Alp Stabelchod in 1991 the park hosted the Alps' first bearded-vulture releases, and the huge birds, extinct here for a century, once again patrol the Engadine skies.
What's worth knowing before you go
Zernez is the gateway — reached by the Rhaetian Railway via the Vereina tunnel from Klosters or up the Inn valley from St. Moritz — and its concrete-cube National Park Centre by Valerio Olgiati is worth the hour before you walk. PostBuses along the Ofen Pass road stop at the numbered trailhead parkings, so day routes are easy without a car. The season runs from the June melt to the first serious snow, usually late October; the only beds inside the park are the Chamanna Cluozza log hut and Hotel Il Fuorn, and both need booking well ahead in summer. In mid-September, Val Trupchun above S-chanf stages the red-deer rut — the closest thing the Alps have to a safari, and the larches begin turning gold a fortnight later.
The connoisseur's move is the Margunet loop from Stabelchod at midday, when the thermals get the bearded vultures aloft over the scree — or the quiet northeastern entry through S-charl into Val Mingèr, where you are likelier to meet a warden than another walker.