Rigi

The Rigi is an isolated massif in central Switzerland, ringed by Lake Lucerne, Lake Zug and Lake Lauerz. Its high point, Rigi Kulm, reaches 1,797 metres; the Rigi Hoflue, the Dossen, the Rigi Scheidegg and the summit Lucerne calls Vitznauerstock and Schwyz calls Gersauerstock stay a little lower. The mountain belongs to both cantons at once. It is not Alpine for all that: apart from a few limestone crags in the south, it belongs to the Subalpine Molasse, and so to the Swiss plateau.

The name says nothing about a crown. From 1479 the humanists derived it from the Latin Regina montium, queen of mountains; the history of the language does not follow them. Rigi is a Swiss German word for a horizontal stratification, a band: the bands that rock and grass draw in turn around the summit, from west to east, and that can be seen from far off. The oldest documents use the plural, Rigenen, because those bands are many; the singular appears in a deed of 1439, when the common noun becomes the name of the mountain.

People have come here for a long time: the virtue of the Rigi Kaltbad spring is recorded as early as 1540, and by the eighteenth century the mountain was already a destination known well beyond its region. Goethe came up in 1775 for the view alone, Victor Hugo in 1839 from Weggis, Turner brought back three watercolours, among them The Blue Rigi, Sunrise. A first wooden guest house rose on the Kulm in 1816; in 1875 the Grand Hotel Schreiber opened with its 300 beds, demolished in the early 1950s. On 21 May 1871 the line from Vitznau became the first mountain railway in Europe; the Arth-Goldau line followed in 1875 and would be, in 1907, the first standard-gauge rack railway in the world to run on electricity.

Why this place is remarkable

The Rigi is the mountain where the excursion turned into an industry, and the landscape still shows it: a hotel on the summit from 1816, a rack railway since 21 May 1871 — the first in Europe — and before that visitors who came for the view alone, Goethe in 1775, Hugo in 1839, Turner and his watercolours. The massif itself is no Alpine peak: it is molasse, and its name refers only to the bands of rock and grass that run around it.

History and origin

Apart from the limestone crags of the Hoflue and the Gersauerstock in the south, the Rigi belongs not to the Alps but to the Subalpine Molasse, that is, to the Swiss plateau. Its rock, weakly bound, packs together material of every size: it is called Nagelfluh. The west and north slopes take heavy rain, which strips the soil in places and elsewhere piles up thick loose deposits mixed with humus.