13th of July after a little rain shower had passed in the morning it looked like we will be lucky and experience no rain around noon, so we took the risk to make another bike tour towards the Riederalp and continue to the Riederfurka. Our trail followed along the Bettmer lake and we discovered my uncle Werner with his sister Erika and my aunt Friedel sitting up on a bench looking over the valley. At the horizon you could already see our destination la villa “Cassel”.
It was in 1895, that Sir Ernest Cassel got the recommendation by the court physician of Queen Victoria to stay up in the high mountain altitude for his health. He wasn’t satisfied with the comfort he found at the so called hotel Rieder Furka and decided to let something be built with higher standard for himself during the time from 1900-1902. The Villa Cassel in Victorian style was developed by many charges of construction material on the back of mules up into the mountain region of the Aletsch forest, where the good smell of Swiss pine wood filled the air.
Even Winston Churchill was a guest in Sir Cassel’s house, but couldn’t concentrate on the biography he was writing about his father due to the cow bells ringing day and night around them. It took several discussions with the local farmers to finally convince them to fix some straw inside the bells for sound isolation. It must have had an effect like someone put DOLBY surround noise reduction into the cinemascope landscape.
Since 1976 the Villa is used by Pro Natura as a centre of information for the UNESCO world heritage site of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau Aletsch and is now under historic cultural monument protection. The exhibition shows very impressive the effects of climate change on the Aletsch glacier, which is still the largest in Europe, but risks to disappear until the end of this century.
I was missing an information centre like this for the Rhone glacier at Furka pass, where a much higher frequency of tourist could be informed about climate change. But they decided instead to cover up the reality with their synthetic textiles.
During the tea time at the salon of Villa Cassel it started to rain outside and at first we thought it might pass, but it intensified even more. So we had no choice, but get our rain gear out and put it on to bike back to Bettmeralp. Only some cows with their bells got in our way and gave us the real impression of the Alpine sound. The rain ended with a beautiful rainbow over the chapel of Bettmeralp.
