Culinary Hiking

Culinary hiking is the activity people remember when the retreat is over. Three or four hours of walking through the trails around Arosa, broken by stops at mountain huts where local food is served at a long shared table, with the next stretch of the route waiting on the other side. It is not a hike in the athletic sense, and it is not a meal in the formal sense. It is the rhythm in between, and that rhythm is where the conversations a team needs actually happen.

The route is built around your group. Our events team works with local guides to choose a path that suits the fitness level of the team, with each leg between thirty and seventy minutes of walking on well-maintained trails. The stops are the point: a soup at the first hut, traditional capuns or pizokel at the second, dessert and coffee on the way back. Each stop is a regional Grisons speciality, often cooked by the family that runs the hut, and the producers behind the food (the cheesemaker, the farmer, the baker) are part of the story the guide tells along the way.

What it does for a team is structural. People walk in pairs, then in different pairs after lunch. New conversation partners replace the predictable ones. Topics that would never be raised in a meeting come up between the second and third stop, when the legs are warm and the air is thin and the conversation has had the time to find its way there. By the end of the route, colleagues who have been on the same project for two years often realise this is the first long unstructured conversation they have ever had. That, more than any specific exercise, is what the day delivers.

The setting belongs to Arosa. The trails between 1,800 and 2,200 metres open into views that would justify the day on their own; the link to Lenzerheide opens 900 kilometres of network if a longer route is wanted. The huts are small, family-run, and serve food that no in-city restaurant can replicate, because the cheese was made on the next mountain over and the bread was in an oven this morning.

The day works either as a half-day morning or as a longer afternoon-into-early-evening option. Returning to Hotel Altein, the 950-square-metre spa is open for tired legs, and dinner that evening is usually lighter (Zus Brasserie suits the register) because the team has already eaten through most of the regional menu earlier in the day.

Our events team co-ordinates the route, the guide, the huts, and the dietary requirements end to end. Hiking boots and weather-appropriate kit are required; we will brief your team in advance.

Send us the retreat dates and the group size, and we will build the culinary hiking day into your programme.