Here in Leysin, we have a large variety of restaurants and a range of cuisines to try. At last count, we think there were around 30 different restaurants in the area. The mountains of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland lie in the alpine group we call the Bernese Alps and are often referred to as the Vaud Alps or Alpes Vaudoise in French. The highest point in the area is in the Diablerets massif at 3210m. The landscape of the area is dominated by views of the Diablerets, the nearby Grand Muveran (3051m), and the triple peaks above Leysin, with their distinctive triple limestone summits named Tour d’Aï, Tour de Mayen, and Tour de Famelon.
The people of Leysin reckon they received one of their first tourists in 1873, when young German suffering from tuberculosis came to try the good air of the village. The first guesthouse opened a few years later, and Leysin was firmly on the map when the railway opened in 1897.
By 1930, Leysin was booming, with nearly 6,000 people in the village – only a couple hundred of these were still farmers, while there were 3,000 tuberculosis patients. Large clinics, or sanatoria, were built to house the patients. These large, grand buildings had large balconies where the patients would be wheeled out to take the air. They can be seen all over Leysin and today house some of the international schools based there. Of course, this was all over with the discovery of antibiotics. When the antibiotic streptomycin was developed in 1946, one by one, the clinics began to close.
Leysin is a tourist center – summer and winter – and a new wave of visitors come to take their own “Licht und Luft” (light and air) cure.