Masescha, where the Walser story begins

Masescha is a small hamlet perched at 1,250 m above Triesenberg, with a white chapel on a sloping meadow and an inn next door. It doesn’t look like much, but to me it’s where the story of Liechtenstein’s mountains starts, which is why it gets a page of its own.

The Walser settlers’ first home

The Historisches Lexikon thinks Masescha was the Walser settlers’ first centre in what is now Liechtenstein, after they arrived around 1300. The hamlet turns up in writing in 1355 as Museschen, and in 1397 a noble couple sold part of their land here to a Walser. Nobody is sure where the name comes from, and the Lexikon says so plainly.

It sits on the Rhine side of the ridge, above Rotenboden, below the Silum alp and on the road up to Gaflei. Over the centuries people moved down to easier ground. Between 1771 and 1814 the area around Masescha and Prufatscheng lost 69% of its population while today’s Triesenberg centre grew by 122%. Now it’s partly lived in all year, with holiday homes and a retreat house belonging to the Adorers of the Blood of Christ.

St Theodul’s chapel, the reason I’d come

The chapel was the Walser settlers’ first church in Triesenberg. It was probably built soon after 1300, although the first document to mention it dates from 1465, when it was a Lady chapel. It has switched saints more than once. In 1595 it was St Theodore’s, with three altars; during the plagues of 1620 and 1628 it became a shrine to St Sebastian; and since 2005, when the Walser marked 650 years here, it has been dedicated to St Theodul, the patron saint of the Valais.

What I like is that you can see it was built in two goes. First came a south-facing choir with a tower, then a broad rectangular nave, and the tower went up to four storeys with the look of a small keep. Inside, the Lexikon picks out the choir frescoes from the second half of the 15th century, a side altar from around 1620 that was once the high altar, and 15 hand-coloured engravings of the Stations of the Cross by the Klauber brothers of Augsburg, from around 1800. The arm reliquary of about 1500 and the originals of the 1661 altar are in the National Museum in Vaduz. If chapels are your thing, I compare it with the rest on my page about churches and chapels in Liechtenstein.

A place people climbed to in prayer

For centuries Masescha was a pilgrimage stop. Triesenberg’s villagers came up in procession on 16 August, St Theodul’s day, and from the 17th century, the Lexikon says, the villages of the county of Vaduz climbed here in penitence on 20 January for St Sebastian and on 16 August for St Roch, the two plague saints. Until 1768 Masescha belonged to Triesen parish, like Wangerberg, the Triesenberg hamlet above Triesen further south, and from 1689 an endowment required a Triesen priest to say Mass here once a week.

From gypsum quarries to summer holidays

The hamlet has had a livelier past than you’d guess. In the early 19th century gypsum was quarried at Masescha and Erbi, and a 1902 plan for a goods cableway down to Schaan fell through for lack of money. Then the visitors came. The road from Triesenberg dates from 1874-1875 and Berggasthaus Masescha opened in 1877 as a tavern before becoming a guesthouse for spa guests. From 1931 to 1943 there was a silver fox farm here, and in 1947 and 1948 motorcycle races ran from Vaduz up to Masescha. There’s a piece of engineering here too. According to the Lexikon, water from the reservoir at Steg travels through a pressure tunnel under the ridge to a surge chamber at Masescha, at 1,270 m, before plunging down a pipeline to the power station in Vaduz.

How to get there, and what to add

Bus 22 runs hourly from Triesenberg centre and drops you at the Masescha, Kapelle stop, right by the chapel, in about 8 minutes. Have a contactless card or the app ready, as cash isn’t accepted.

I’d pair Masescha with Gaflei, four minutes further up on the same bus, then come back down for lunch. Berggasthaus Masescha has 13 Gault-Millau points and is on the official list of places serving Käsknöpfle, the cheesy pasta I cover on my page about the national dish. If you’d rather walk, head up to Silum, the alp above Masescha, between 1,400 and 1,700 m.