2'114 m
Graubünden / Lombardia, Italy
The Splügen Pass is an ancient crossing at 2,114 metres on the Swiss–Italian border, linking the village of Splügen in the Rheinwald with Chiavenna and, beyond it, Lake Como; the watershed between the Rhine and the Po runs across its summit.
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The Splügen Pass is an ancient crossing at 2,114 metres on the Swiss–Italian border, linking the village of Splügen in the Rheinwald with Chiavenna and, beyond it, Lake Como; the watershed between the Rhine and the Po runs across its summit. Known to the Romans, it became one of the great medieval trade corridors between Milan and the Holy Roman Empire, its mule caravans carrying salt, wine and cloth – and between 1818 and 1823 the Austrians, then masters of Milan, had the engineer Carlo Donegani drive a carriage road over it, the second such road across the Swiss Alps after the Simplon. The southern descent is the drama: nearly 1,800 metres down to Chiavenna through the Val San Giacomo and the dreaded Cardinello gorge.
That gorge holds a grim story. In December 1800, amid the Napoleonic Wars, the French Marshal Jacques Macdonald drove an army of some 15,000 men over the Splügen in a raging snowstorm – and hundreds of his soldiers were swept to their deaths by avalanches in the Cardinello, one of the most harrowing winter crossings in Alpine military history. Today, closed by snow each winter and bypassed by the San Bernardino tunnel, the Splügen is a quiet, spectacular road once more – and in 2021 its hairpins drew the Giro d'Italia, briefly returning the spotlight to a pass the wider world had half-forgotten.
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