Passo del Forno
2'149 m
Graubünden
The Ofenpass – Pass dal Fuorn in Romansh – climbs to 2,149 metres between Zernez in the Engadine and the Val Müstair near the Italian border, and it is unlike any other Swiss pass road: it runs straight through the Swiss National Park, the country's oldest and most strictly protected nature reserve, where you may not leave the trail, pick a flower or fell a tree, and the whole habitat is left untouched by human hands.
ROUTE
ELEVATION PROFILE
ROUTE MAP
DESCRIPTION
The Ofenpass – Pass dal Fuorn in Romansh – climbs to 2,149 metres between Zernez in the Engadine and the Val Müstair near the Italian border, and it is unlike any other Swiss pass road: it runs straight through the Swiss National Park, the country's oldest and most strictly protected nature reserve, where you may not leave the trail, pick a flower or fell a tree, and the whole habitat is left untouched by human hands. There are no dramatic hairpins here, only a calm, flowing drive through dense mountain forest. Even its name tells a story: in the late Middle Ages iron ore was mined and smelted here, and that is where the name of the Ofenpass – "furnace" – comes from; the ruins of those old ovens can still be seen from nearby trails.
And this is genuinely wild country. In July 2005 a brown bear was photographed near the pass – the first sighting of a wild bear in Switzerland since 1923 – a sign of just how untamed the park has remained (the area also hides one of Europe's largest living things, a giant honey fungus reckoned to be about a thousand years old). And at the eastern foot of the pass, in Müstair, stands the Benedictine Convent of St. John, a UNESCO World Heritage Site famous for its murals of around 800 AD, one of the oldest painted churches in the Alps.
SELECTED ROUTE