Davos Ski Guide: Five Mountains, One High Town

Davos is five separate mountains wrapped around a high-altitude town that happens not to be pretty, and both halves of that sentence matter before you book. The skiing is big, varied and genuinely world-class in places. The base is a real city -- Europe's highest, strung along a couple of kilometres of main road -- not the car-free alpine village a lot of people are picturing. If you want charm you will be disappointed. If you want serious terrain, superb trains and a mountain for every mood, Davos delivers more than almost anywhere in the Swiss Alps.

Five mountains, and they are not one lift network

This is the single most important thing to understand, so here it is plainly: Davos Klosters is not one connected ski area. It is a collection of separate mountains that share a lift pass, and you use the train and bus to get between them. Only two of them are actually linked to each other.

Parsenn is the headline and the reason to come. The Parsennbahn funicular climbs out of Davos Dorf to the Weissfluhjoch, and the terrain above rolls on toward the Weissfluhgipfel at roughly 2,844 m. What makes Parsenn special is the descents: long, cruising red runs that drop off the back of the massif and keep going, all the way down to Klosters, or further to the valley villages of Wolfgang and Küblis. These are proper journey runs of many kilometres and well over a thousand vertical metres, the kind you finish with your thighs burning and a train ticket back up. Parsenn is also lift-linked to the Gotschna sector above Klosters Platz, so this one connected area spans two valleys.

Jakobshorn rises straight up from Davos Platz and is the freestyle mountain. Topping out around 2,590 m, it has been the snowboard and park hill for decades, with a serious terrain park, a young crowd and a couple of famously loud on-mountain bars. If you ride, or you like your afternoons a bit rowdy, this is your base.

Madrisa sits above Klosters Dorf and is the family mountain: sunny, gentle, south-facing, with a good kids' area and the least intimidating terrain in the region. It is a train or bus hop away from everything else.

Rinerhorn and Pischa are the quiet pair. Rinerhorn, down the valley at Glaris, is a locals' mountain -- uncrowded, unpretentious, good for families who want space. Pischa has largely reinvented itself as a freeride and ski-touring hill rather than a piste-basher's mountain, with more marked routes and off-piste than groomed runs. Neither is where you spend your whole week, and both are gloriously empty when Parsenn has a queue.

Add it all up and the region markets something in the order of 300 km of piste across the mountains, served by around 50 lifts. Treat those as approximate and season-dependent, but the scale is real. What is equally real is that no single mountain is 300 km -- you have to move to use it.

The lift-link problem, and why it is not a dealbreaker

Here is the honest trade-off. In a linked mega-area like Laax or the French Three Valleys you clip in at your door and ski for a week without repeating yourself. Davos does not work that way. To ski Jakobshorn in the morning and Parsenn in the afternoon you come down, walk or ride to a station, and take the train two stops. It costs you time and a bit of faff.

What softens it is that the faff is well organised. The Davos Klosters lift pass includes local trains and the ski bus, the Rhaetian Railway runs frequently along the valley floor between Klosters, Davos Dorf and Davos Platz, and the whole thing is punctual in the way only Swiss transport is. You are not white-knuckling a car up an icy pass; you are getting on a warm train. Once you accept that Davos is a "base yourself in town and range out" resort rather than a "ski home to your chalet" resort, the model makes sense. It just is not the model a lot of first-timers expect, and it is worth knowing before you arrive rather than on day one.

Davos the town: high, functional, not charming

Davos is the highest town in Europe, at around 1,560 m, and it wears its history on its face. It grew up as a tuberculosis health resort in the 19th century -- the thin, dry, high air was the treatment -- which is why it is a town of big institutional buildings and grand old sanatorium hotels rather than timber chalets. Thomas Mann set The Magic Mountain in a Davos sanatorium; the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his later years here. It is a place with real weight to it.

It is also, bluntly, not beautiful in the way Zermatt or the villages people put on calendars are. Davos is a working town of some 11,000 people, built along a long main street with traffic, supermarkets, a hospital and a conference centre. That last one matters: Davos hosts the World Economic Forum every January, and for that week the town belongs to heads of state, CEOs and their security details. Skiing carries on, but hotels sell out and prices spike, so leisure visitors give mid-to-late January a wide berth.

The flip side of "not a village" is that Davos has facilities a village cannot match. Europe's largest natural ice rink. A huge network of cross-country trails -- this is one of the great langlauf towns in the Alps. Proper shops, proper restaurants, a genuine nightlife, and the sense that the place exists year-round for reasons beyond tourism. If you have ever found a purpose-built ski village a bit hollow, Davos is the antidote. If you wanted the postcard, look at most beautiful resorts instead and adjust your expectations here.

Getting there: this is a train town

Davos is one of the best-connected big resorts in the Alps for anyone travelling by rail. From Zurich it is roughly 2.5-3 hours: an intercity train to Landquart, then the Rhaetian Railway up the valley, with stations at both Davos Dorf and Davos Platz in the centre of town. You step off the platform into the resort. No transfer coach, no hire car buried under snow for a week, no mountain pass to drive.

Because the ski pass covers local public transport and the mountains are spread along the valley anyway, a car is close to pointless here and in some ways a liability -- you will be parking it and taking the train regardless. This is a resort that genuinely rewards leaving the car at home, which is not something you can say about most areas this size.

Who Davos is for, and who should look elsewhere

Davos suits strong intermediates and above who value terrain variety over convenience, who like a real town with real amenities, and who do not mind a train ride as the price of five different mountains. It is excellent for mixed groups, because a boarder can spend the day on Jakobshorn while a family takes Madrisa and a piste-mile hunter laps the Parsenn descents, all on one pass, all meeting for dinner in town.

It is a weaker pick if you want ski-in, ski-out simplicity, if a car-free storybook village is high on your list, or if you are a nervous near-beginner who wants everything on one gentle hill -- the terrain is there for you on Madrisa and Rinerhorn, but you will be commuting to it. And if your fixed dates land on WEF week, either embrace the chaos or go somewhere else that January.

Where to stay

Base yourself by the trains, not by a single lift, because the trains are how this resort works. Davos Platz is the busier, more central end, close to the Jakobshorn lift and most of the restaurants and nightlife. Davos Dorf is quieter and sits right by the Parsennbahn, which is the lift you will use most if Parsenn is your priority. Both have RhB stations, so neither traps you.

Klosters is the other option and a very different one: smaller, prettier, more village-like, with its own access to the Gotschna-Parsenn area and to Madrisa. If the "Davos is a bit of a city" problem bothers you, staying in Klosters and skiing the same pass is the honest fix -- you trade some nightlife and central bustle for a lot more charm.

How Davos compares to its Graubünden neighbours

Davos sits in the same corner of Switzerland as several resorts people weigh it against. St. Moritz is the glamour play -- higher-end, more polished, more expensive, with its own famous but similarly disconnected spread of mountains. Laax is the freestyle and snowboard capital of the region and a genuinely linked ski area, so if the lift-link problem is what puts you off Davos, Laax is the obvious counter. Arosa-Lenzerheide is the friendlier, more compact family option, now joined into one sizeable linked area by cable car. All four share the excellent Rhaetian Railway access.

The short version: choose Davos for terrain scale, a real town and unbeatable trains, and accept that you will ride between the mountains rather than ski between them. That trade is the whole character of the place, and once it clicks, few resorts give you this much for one pass.