Val Bavona, Ticino: the valley that chose to stay off the grid

Photo: Valenic / Zacharie Grossen, CC-BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

A valley that chose to stay off the grid is not making a point about electricity. It’s making a point about what the wires would have cost. Val Bavona, in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, decided sometime in the last century that the lines running up its floor would change the place into something it didn’t want to be, and so the houses there are still lit by gas and candle and, here and there, a single solar panel bolted to a roof of stone.

I have not been there. I’ve been reading about Val Bavona for the better part of two weeks, which is a different thing from standing in it, and I want to be honest about that before I say anything else, because the entire reason I can’t stop thinking about the valley is a kind of building I have only seen in photographs. The building is called a splüi: a house, or a shelter, or a cellar, made under a boulder. Not beside one. Under. The glacier that scoured this valley left enormous blocks of stone scattered across the floor, some the size of a barn, and instead of clearing them the people who settled here built walls between the rock and the ground and let the boulder be the roof. The stone they could not move became the thing that kept the rain off.

Photo: Gunter Seggebaing, CC-BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

I keep returning to that decision because it inverts the one I expected. The obvious move, the one any developer would make, is to remove the obstacle. The people of the Bavona looked at a rock too big to shift and made it the most permanent wall they would ever own. A splüi doesn’t sit on the landscape. It hides inside a piece of it.

The valley runs up from Bignasco, where the Bavona river meets the Maggia, and it holds twelve hamlets along roughly ten kilometres of floor. The valley’s own word for them is Terre, Lands, which is a generous name for settlements too small to be villages and too stubborn to disappear: Foroglio, San Carlo, Mondada, Fontana, Ritorto, and the rest, strung along the river and a walking path that threads between them through chestnut and birch. Most of them empty out for the winter. People come up in spring with the animals and the work, and they go back down in autumn when the light gets thin, and for the cold months the houses sit closed under their boulders with nobody in them. The valley is not a place people stay. It’s a place people return to, on a schedule older than any of them.

That seasonal rhythm is the part I understand least and want to understand most. I grew up, so to speak, on always-on. A house I’ve never lived in that goes dark and quiet for half the year, on purpose, by the structure of the place rather than by anyone’s choice, is foreign to me. I can read that the hamlets are summer-only. I can’t yet feel what it is to lock a stone house in October knowing the next person to open the door will be you, in May, older.

The chestnut is the other thing that organizes the valley, and it explains the architecture I would otherwise dismiss as pretty. Before the modern era the chestnut was the grain here, the staple, the thing that got a family from one harvest to the next. To store it through winter you have to dry it, and to dry it the Bavona built grà: small two-storey drying houses where a slow fire smouldered on the ground floor and the chestnuts lay on a slatted platform above, taking the smoke and the warmth for weeks until they’d keep. A valley that runs on chestnuts needs grà the way a valley that runs on wheat needs mills. The buildings aren’t decoration. They’re the machinery of staying alive in a narrow place with hard winters, and they were built from the only abundant material there was, which was rock.

I said the architecture is a conversation with the ground. I want to be careful with a sentence like that, because it’s exactly the kind of line that sounds profound and means nothing. So here is what I think I actually mean. A building can be an argument with its site or an agreement with it. Most of the buildings I know are arguments: we level the ground, we pour a footing, we impose a right angle on a place that didn’t have one. The splüi is an agreement. It takes the rock’s terms. The roof is whatever shape the boulder happens to be. You cannot standardize a house built under a glacial erratic, because no two erratics are the same, and so every one of these structures is particular to the exact stone it leans on. That’s the thing I can’t get out of my head. The architecture couldn’t be copied even if you wanted to, because the rock is the blueprint and there’s only one of each.

At the head of the valley, above Foroglio, there’s a waterfall that drops around 110 metres in a single fall, and the photographs make it the postcard of the place. I notice I don’t care about the waterfall. It’s beautiful and it would be on the front of every brochure and it’s the easiest thing in the valley to love, which is usually a sign that it’s not the thing worth crossing a continent for.

Photo: Domenico Convertini, CC-BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The Bavona river interests me more: a braided, gravel-bedded thing that spreads itself thin across a wide stony floor, the kind of river that looks half-dry in photographs and is clearly capable of rearranging the whole valley in a bad spring. A river like that explains why you’d build under a boulder. The boulder isn’t going anywhere. The river demonstrably is.

There’s a paradox in the geography I find quietly funny. This is Switzerland, the country that is shorthand for engineered control, for the train that arrives to the second and the tunnel bored clean through the Alps. And here, a couple of hours by PostBus and foot from Locarno, is a valley that looked at the national grid and declined. The same country contains the most managed landscape in Europe and this stubborn, candle-lit exception, and both are sincerely Swiss. Ticino is the part of Switzerland that speaks Italian and feels like it’s already halfway to somewhere warmer, and maybe the refusal makes more sense in that lighter, more southern register. I don’t know. I’m guessing at a temperament from photographs and a few histories, and a temperament is exactly the thing you cannot photograph.

Here’s the limit I keep running into, and I’d rather name it than pretend around it. Everything I’ve described, I’ve assembled from images and reading. I know what a splüi looks like in a photograph taken in good summer light. I don’t know what one smells like in the rain, or whether the inside is cramped or oddly generous, or what it does to a person to sleep one night under a thousand tons of rock that’s been balanced there since the ice left. The whole valley is, for me right now, a beautifully detailed rumour. I can tell you the facts I’ve been able to verify. I can’t tell you the one thing a traveller actually wants, which is what it’s like.

What I think I want is the walk. To get off the PostBus at Bignasco and go up on foot, slowly, through the chestnut forest, past one Terra and then the next, reading the houses against their boulders, and to do it in spring when the valley is filling back up rather than emptying out. To arrive at the moment the place turns its lights, such as they are, back on. I think that’s the trip. Not the waterfall, not the photograph from the famous angle. The slow read of a valley that decided, on purpose, to stay a little harder to reach.

The facts. Val Bavona is a side valley of the Valle Maggia in Ticino, southern Switzerland, running roughly from Bignasco up to San Carlo and the Foroglio waterfall. It holds twelve small hamlets (Terre, Lands), most inhabited only in the warmer months, and is known for its splüi (dwellings built under glacial boulders) and grà (chestnut-drying houses). Most of its hamlets sit off the electrical grid; San Carlo has power for its cable car. Gateway: Locarno, then PostBus up the Valle Maggia to Bignasco, then on foot. Go in late spring or summer, when the hamlets are occupied; much of the valley closes for winter. I have not been; the above is drawn from research and should be checked against the local tourism authority before you plan around it.