The Most Beautiful Places in Grisons
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Grisons are Landwasser Viaduct, Albula Railway and Brusio spiral viaduct. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Grisons is the largest Swiss canton and the most mountainous, a maze of high valleys draining to the Rhine, the Inn and the rivers of Italy. It is also the only canton with three official languages, German, Romansh and Italian, a sign of how isolated its valleys long were. Connecting them demanded some of the boldest railway engineering in Europe, and the Rhaetian Railway's lines over the Albula and Bernina passes are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Albula Railway climbs from Thusis to the Engadine through spiral tunnels and viaducts. Its best-known structure is the Landwasser Viaduct, a curved stone bridge whose tall piers carry trains straight into a tunnel in a sheer cliff. The Bernina line crosses the Alps at the highest point of any railway in the range without rack assistance, then descends steeply towards Italy; at Brusio it turns a full circle on a spiral viaduct to lose height in a small space.
Nature and architecture complete the picture. The Ruinaulta is the gorge of the young Rhine, cut through the debris of the enormous Flims rockslide, with pale cliffs and pinnacles above the river. In the Valser valley, the Therme Vals by Peter Zumthor is built from layered slabs of local quartzite around the waters of a thermal spring, one of the most admired buildings of its time.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Landwasser Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 2 | Albula Railway | Heritage railway | |
| 3 | Brusio spiral viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 4 | Therme Vals | Thermal bath | |
| 5 | Ruinaulta | Canyon | |
| 6 | Bernina railway line | Heritage railway |
01 Landwasser Viaduct
Landwasserviadukt
Switzerland · 23.1 km from Chur46.681° N 9.676° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Landwasser Viaduct is the image most people have of Alpine railways: six slender stone arches curving high above a wooded gorge and running straight into a tunnel mouth in a sheer cliff.
Did you know? Stone came from a limestone quarry about 500 metres downstream, linked to the site by a temporary narrow-gauge field railway.
02 Albula Railway
Albulabahn
Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5 The Albula line is where Swiss railway engineering turned into landscape art. Linking Thusis with St. 7 km metre-gauge railway was begun in September 1898, opened in July 1903 and extended to St. Moritz a year later. 5 percent.
Did you know? Water bursting into the Albula Tunnel during construction drove the building contractor into bankruptcy; 1,316 people worked on it and 16 were killed.
03 Brusio spiral viaduct
Kreisviadukt von Brusio
Switzerland46.254° N 10.128° E
Kabelleger / David Gubler ( http://www.bahnbilder.ch ) · CC BY 3.0 The Brusio spiral viaduct is the moment on the Bernina line when the train seems to chase its own tail.
Did you know? Between the Bernina Pass and Tirano the railway descends about 1,824 metres, which makes it one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world.
04 Therme Vals
Switzerland · 35.2 km from Chur46.622° N 9.181° E
fcamusd · CC BY 2.0 In the village of Vals, at the head of a side valley of the Graubünden Alps, Peter Zumthor built a bathhouse that reads as if it had been quarried out of the mountain rather than put on it.
Did you know? The springs of Vals also supply Valser, one of Switzerland's best-known brands of mineral water.
05 Ruinaulta
Switzerland · 14.9 km from Chur46.808° N 9.315° E
Image by Monikas_Wunderwelt from Pixabay Ruinaulta, the Rhine Gorge, is the canyon the Vorderrhein has cut through the debris of the Flims rockslide, one of the greatest landslides known in the Alps.
Did you know? The debris dammed the Vorderrhein and created Lake Ilanz, which persisted at around 820–840 metres above sea level for at least a thousand years.
06 Bernina railway line
Berninabahn
Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E
Image by hpgruesen from Pixabay The Bernina line is the railway that proves a train can climb like a mountain road. 7 km from St.
Did you know? The original Bernina railway company teetered near bankruptcy for decades, and in 1943 it was taken over by the Rhaetian Railway.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Grisons?
- On our list, Landwasser Viaduct ranks first, followed by Albula Railway and Brusio spiral viaduct.
- Why are the Albula and Bernina railways a UNESCO site?
- Opened in the early 20th century, the two lines show how a railway could cross high Alpine terrain with tunnels, spirals and viaducts while fitting into the landscape. UNESCO listed them together in 2008.
- How was the Ruinaulta formed?
- About 10,000 years ago the Flims rockslide, one of the largest known in the Alps, blocked the Rhine valley. The river has since cut a gorge through the loose debris, leaving steep white cliffs.
- Who designed Therme Vals?
- The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Completed in 1996, the bath is built from thin layers of local Vals quartzite and was later protected as a historic monument.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Grisons?
- In our collection, the places in Grisons are most often viaducts (2), heritage railways (2), canyons and gorges (1) and thermal baths (1).
- How many places are on this list in Grisons?
- The list covers 6 places.