All'Acqua: the hidden corner that stole a long hiking weekend

We have been hiking one of Switzerland's long-distance trails in pieces: a weekend here, a weekend there, squeezing two stages into a day whenever the legs allow. After enough of those weekends the views start to run together. Then you walk into somewhere like All'Acqua and stop.

All'Acqua is barely a place. It is a handful of stone buildings in Val Bedretto, the high valley in the far top corner of Ticino, on the road that climbs to the Nufenen Pass and drops into the Valais on the other side. We left on the Friday around midday and finished on the Sunday evening, which is the usual shape of these weekends, and we started walking from All'Acqua after work, with 22 kilometres and a thousand metres of ascent to Ulrichen ahead of us, over the pass. That stretch turned out to be the nicest area of the whole weekend.

It is an unlikely mix. A reservoir sitting high in the mountains, its water going still and pale in the evening light. Wind turbines turning slowly on the ridge above it, strange that far up. Bare peaks on every side, snow and ice still clinging to the highest of them. And goats, on slopes that look too steep to stand on. We spent about an hour up there just taking photographs, which on a day with hours of walking still to go tells you what it was like.

Three passes in three days later, we were done for the week, and the part we kept talking about was not the biggest climb or the longest day. It was that corner above All'Acqua. Whether you are crossing this end of the country on foot or driving over the Nufenen, slow down when you reach it. The long way exists for places like this.