1'090 m
St. Gallen
The Wildhaus Pass sits at the head of the Toggenburg, a high green saddle at 1,090 metres between the Säntis massif and the Churfirsten, linking Gams in the Rhine valley with Unterwasser and Wattwil.
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The Wildhaus Pass sits at the head of the Toggenburg, a high green saddle at 1,090 metres between the Säntis massif and the Churfirsten, linking Gams in the Rhine valley with Unterwasser and Wattwil. The village of Wildhaus sits right on the pass – before the 2010 mergers, the highest municipality in the canton – a sunny shelf of meadows and small lakes that has grown into Eastern Switzerland's largest winter-sports area. Above it brood the ruins of the Wildenburg, a castle built by the barons of Sax around 1200, later sold to the Counts of Toggenburg, and finally struck by lightning and burned down in 1660.
But the pass's true claim to fame is a man. On 1 January 1484, in the hamlet of Lisighaus just below the summit, Huldrych Zwingli was born – the reformer who would launch the Swiss Reformation from Zürich. His birth house still stands, one of the oldest surviving timber farmhouses in Switzerland, now listed as a heritage site of national significance. There is a quiet symmetry in his story and these mountains: the man born high on the Wildhaus would fall in battle at Kappel, at the foot of the Albis, in 1531. Today the crossing is a gentle, scenic one – and for a decade after 1939 it even had its own curiosity, a toboggan cable car called the "Funi", which carried two sledges up and down the snow like a funicular.
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