Name: The ultimate escape: a pilgrimage to Europe's highest hotel | FT
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T16:23:18.000Z
Duration: 6 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Of all the thousands of hotels in Europe, one

stands head and shoulders above the rest.

The Capanna Margherita, the Margherita Hut in English,

by glaciers at an altitude of 4,554 metres, almost 3

Apart from a tiny emergency shelter on Russia's Mount

It's the end of a sweltering week in Europe,

but we're going up somewhere where it's always snowy.

We're going up to Europe's highest hotel.

The Margherita Hut sleeps 70 and is open to all,

but getting there isn't exactly straightforward.

You start in one of two Italian villages - Alagna or Gressoney

- and ride their cable cars as high as they will go,

From there, it's an hour's walk to a climber's refuge

where you spend the night, and at dawn the next day

you don crampons and a rope for a five-hour glacier hike

You've made it up to the Capanna Gnifetti,

a pit stop for the night before we go up early tomorrow

They were both built in the middle of the 19th century

when Alpinism was just starting to take off

across this area as an upper class pursuit.

so we've got a problem of dealing with crevasses.

It will be demanding mainly because of the altitude.

So it's 5:45 and we're just about to set off up

We've got about 900 metres of vertical ascent to go,

No one would build a hotel so high today.

The Margherita Hut is a relic of an earlier golden age

In the late 19th century little Italian villages

at the foot of Monte Rosa were booming as climbing

Even the king and queen, Umberto and Margherita,

The Italian Alpine Club ordered the construction of the hut

It was opened by Queen Margherita and named in her

honour, as later was a certain type of pizza.

Tourism collapsed and the villages retreated to obscurity

- but up on the frozen summit, the hotel endured.

So we've been going for a couple of hours.

to cross the final glacier up to the Margherita Hut.

than at sea level, which makes altitude sickness

to be rescued by helicopter and taken back down the valley.

Most mountain huts in the Alps are halfway up the mountain,

to be pit stops for climbers on their way up to the summit.

built the refuge right on the summit itself.

There's only two peaks in all of the Alps

and yet this isn't some gnarly climber's bivouac.

Claudio Bonetta is one of the team of five

who run the hotel, typically working for a fortnight

before descending for a break at lower altitude.

I asked him what it was like to work up among the clouds.

Maybe the first days when you are just arriving,

you can feel the altitude, a little bit sick.

But - then no problem - and work at the same time.

When you finish your season here, where do you go?

The most popular dish here is Pizza Margherita, what else?

There's also a small bar with a real espresso

machine, a tiny library, and a big sun terrace.

as a base for high-altitude scientific research.

I've been to thousands of hotels but this

Now, though, it's time to start the long walk down.

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The ultimate escape: a pilgrimage to Europe's highest hotel | FT

ultimate

typically

spectacular

straightforward