Parc Ela

Parc Ela – Switzerland’s largest Nature Park

With steep mountain summits and open landscapes, surrounded by glaciers and mountain lakes, the park still offers a genuine feeling of the wild. In the valleys, historical villages and baroque churches remind of the earlier importance for commercial routes over the alpine passes Albula, Julier and Septimer. Nature, people, and their products make Parc Ela unique!

The Septimer, Julier and Albula are three historically significant north-south alpine passes lying inside the Nature Park. Be it Roman cart tracks and pillars, medieval castles, baroque churches, hotels from stagecoach times or historical villages, they all testify to the rich pass history.  

The extraordinary cultural richness of the Parc Ela lies in the wide variety of nature. The landscape changes continually from the lowest point in the Schinschlucht (745m) to the summit of Piz Kesch (3418m). The Nature Park offers gentle hedgerow country, floral dry grasslands, rugged gorges, untouched pine forests, barren landscapes with glaciers and mountain lakes, views of high summits and an unusual variety of plants and animals. The nature park municipalities cooperate in strengthening the regional economy, protecting nature and landscape and preserving the cultural heritage.