Sent

Sent holds a sunny terrace on the left bank of the Inn, at about 1,440 metres, in the Lower Engadine. Vallader, a dialect of Romansh, has remained the language of most of its inhabitants. The municipality existed until 2015, when it joined Scuol together with Ardez, Ftan, Guarda and Tarasp. Its former territory rose to Piz Tasna, at 3,179 metres, and took in the hamlets of Sur En, Crusch, Sinestra and Zuort.

The village is first mentioned in 930, when King Henry I gave a priest from Ramosch the church of the vicus Sindes — which of the two, St Peter or St Lawrence, is unclear, and the origin of the name remains unexplained. At the entrance to the village, the ruin of the Baseglia San Peder dates from around 1200; abandoned after the Reformation, it probably owes its still standing tower to its use as a powder store. The church of St Lawrence was enlarged in Gothic style in 1496 by Andreas Bühler. Sent has burned often: an Austrian army set it alight in 1499, and five great village fires followed, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

What strikes you first are the façades. Many houses carry sgraffito scratched into the render and, above all, the curved gable: a Baroque form brought from South Tyrol at the end of the eighteenth century, so characteristic of the place that it took its name. The slope below keeps the trace of the fields. It was terraced for arable farming, and the steep strips that now divide the pastures are hedges, home to many bird species.

Why this place is remarkable

Sent did everything last: the last community in the Lower Engadine to turn to the Reformation, in 1576, the last village in the Engadine to adopt the new calendar, in 1811. That lateness left a whole village behind — sgraffito on the render, curved gables that carry its name — and a slope whose old field banks, now hedges between the pastures, make a landscape without equal in Switzerland.

History and origin

Until the end of the nineteenth century Sent was the most populous village in the Engadine. Its economy did not rest on the fields alone: around 1800 it sold large quantities of timber to Hall in Tyrol, and Tyrolean entrepreneurs ran a cotton mill here. Early in the twentieth century a spa building went up in the Val Sinestra, beside carbonate springs charged with arsenic. By the middle of that century a long-standing grain-growing agriculture had shifted almost entirely to livestock and milk.