Tarasp

Tarasp occupies the right bank of the Inn, in the Lower Engadine, at the foot of the Sesvenna range, at about 1,403 metres. It has never formed a compact village: it is made of a dozen hamlets — Fontana, Vulpera, Nairs, Sparsels, Aschera, Avrona, Chaposch, Chants, Florins, Sgnè, Vallatscha — spread over the terraces and level shelves around the rock spur the castle crowns. The lists do not agree on their number: ten in one count, eleven in the other, depending on whether Nairs is included. To the south the territory rises to the Piz Pisoc, whose height is given as 3,173 and as 3,174 metres. Since 1 January 2015 Tarasp is no longer a commune: it merged with Ardez, Guarda, Ftan and Sent into that of Scuol.

The castle was built in 1040, on a rock commanding the floor of the valley. The lordship passed from the lords of Tarasp to the counts of Tyrol, then to the Habsburgs, who bought it in 1463: Tarasp thereby became an Austrian enclave inside the Free State of the Three Leagues. It remained one until 1803, the last Austrian holding on Swiss soil, before being incorporated into the canton of Grisons. That history left a mark still visible: where the Lower Engadine went over to the Reformation, Tarasp stayed Catholic. Separation from the parish of Scuol was settled in 1559; the church of the Trinity, at Fontana, was raised between 1674 and 1678 by Blasius Ploirer on the foundations of a sanctuary of 1567.

In the nineteenth century the mineral springs did the rest. A first hotel opened at Vulpera in 1845, the Kurhaus rose at Nairs in 1865, and between 1874 and 1876 the architect Bernhard Simon built a pump room on the bank of the Inn whose octagonal dome shelters the Bonifacius, Lucius and Emerita springs. The Grand Hotel Waldhaus, opened at Vulpera on 8 June 1897 and covered in sgraffito, burned down in 1989. The castle changed hands without falling into ruin: bought around 1900 by the industrialist Karl August Lingner, who restored it, it has belonged since March 2016 to the artist Not Vital.

Why this place is remarkable

Tarasp owes its singularity to a political anomaly that became a religious one: bought by the Habsburgs in 1463, the lordship stayed Austrian, and Catholic, in the middle of a valley that had gone over to the Reformation, until it was ceded in 1803. On the ground this gives a Baroque parish church at Fontana, a castle of 1040 perched on its rock, and a commune that never had a central village — only hamlets set one after another across the slope.

History and origin

Cup-marked stones recorded near Sgnè point to an early presence, but no settlement is attested before the eleventh century, when lords from the Lake Como region founded the lordship and built the castle, in 1040. After their line died out the domain became a Tyrolean fief in 1239, then passed to the Habsburgs in 1463. Sold in 1687 to the princes of Dietrichstein, the lordship was ceded to Switzerland in 1803 and attached to Grisons. The spa era opened in the middle of the nineteenth century and closed with the First World War; tourism only resumed from the 1970s.