History
In 1839, Zermatt's doctor, Josef Lauber, first started to offer accommodations in his private home to a growing number of foreign visitors. He thus laid the foundations for the village at the foot of the Matterhorn to become a world-famous tourist resort. But it was Alexander Seiler (1819-1891), an immigrant from the neighboring Goms, who made the decisive contribution.
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In 1851, at the instigation of his older brother who was chaplain in Zermatt, the trained soap and candle maker came to Zermatt for the first time. He was immediately taken with the unique scenery. Two summers later he returned, taking over the lease for Lauber's inn, which Lauber had already started calling Hôtel du Mont-Rose and which now had a competitor, the Hôtel Mont-Cervin. After the second summer season of his lease, Seiler was able to buy the old wooden building. He immediately set out to transform the inn into an imposing stone edifice and then expanded it several more times. It still has at its core various parts of the original wooden structure as well as the stone staircase from the 1850s. The British illustrator Edward Whymper (1840-1911) first stayed at the Monte Rosa in 1860. It was also his home base when, with the help of local mountain guides, he was the first person to reach the summit of the Matterhorn in 1865. The Monte Rosa thus became the local headquarters for numerous British mountain climbers. The hotel was only fully winterized in 1960, when central heating was added; before that, it was only open in summer. Recognizing the Monte Rosa's significance as the parent hotel of the Seiler hotel dynasty, the hotel was completely renovated in the summer of 2008. The large dining room with its stucco work is particularly impressive, still largely preserved in its original form going back to an 1891 overhaul. The Monte Rosa became a founding member of Swiss Historic Hotels in 2004.
