The Walser Museum, the mountainside settled from the Valais

You can’t make sense of Triesenberg without the Walser, and you can’t make sense of the Walser without this museum. If you’re climbing from Vaduz on your way to Malbun, it’s worth a stop, not least because it explains why people in this village clinging to the slope speak differently from the valley below.

Who were the Walser?

In the 13th century settlers from the Valais, in Switzerland, came to Triesenberg. They settled the mountainside with special rights that the bonded peasants down in the valley lacked. According to the museum, they could marry freely, paid no dues or taxes, and held their land on a hereditary lease, so they could swap it, pledge it or pass it to their children.

They lived in isolation and made almost everything themselves, from food to cloth and light. Each family took its own cattle up to the alp and produced its own milk and cheese, a system so complicated that it was given up only after stiff resistance. And they spoke, as many still do, a very old Alemannic dialect related to the one in the Upper Valais, explained in more depth in my notes on the Liechtenstein dialect.

Inside the museum

The museum opened in 1961 and was the country’s first local museum, according to the Historisches Lexikon. The collection was gathered from the 1940s by Engelbert Bucher, and in 1981 it moved to larger rooms in the village centre. Today it fills three floors at Schlossstrasse 5.

The best way in, to my mind, is the multivision show, 25 minutes of film and images of village life, which you can watch in German, English, French or Italian. Then come the rooms on the Walser arrival, their language, their rights, how they worked the land, religion and the cult of the dead. Among the objects the museum mentions for its themed displays are memorial cards made with real human hair, and the first floor currently has an exhibition on 100 years of the Schlossstrasse.

The Walserhaus and the hut at Steg

This, to my mind, is the heart of the visit. Two hundred metres from the museum, in the Hag, stands the Walserhaus, a log house of about 400 years on a stone base. It shows how a large family lived in the 19th century, with an open fire, a kitchen blackened by smoke, a clay stove and hardly any light. Visits are by guided tour only, and the last stretch is on foot.

The other piece is further off, at Steg, beside the chapel where the lanes to Steg and Kleinsteg part. That’s where the museum’s old maiensäss hut stands, a barn of round logs to which a cheese room and milk cellar were added in 1896. In 2009 it was moved and listed. During the weeks on the mid-mountain pasture, a farmer needed a hut with a cheese room and a byre, always under one roof, and here you see why. It’s also shown on guided tours, and if you’re going to Steg it’s on your way.

Hours and prices, with a warning

The museum closes at lunchtime, and that catches people out. On weekdays it opens from 08:00 to 12:00 and 15:00 to 18:00, on Saturday only from 08:00 to 11:00, and on Sundays and public holidays it only takes booked groups. I’d arrive early.

Admission is CHF 5 and under-16s go free. Guided tours, in German, English or French, must be booked by email, phone or at the desk, and cost CHF 90 plus admission with the multivision show included. The multivision with an unguided visit is CHF 60 plus admission. Tours can also run outside opening hours. With the All Inclusive Erlebnispass, entry is free.

The multivision room, ground floor and first floor have a lift, there’s coach parking, and public toilets are in the administration building next door. Large groups are split and take turns between the film and the tour, so sharing the morning with a coach party shouldn’t spoil your visit.

Fitting it into your day

Bus 21 climbs from Vaduz to Triesenberg and carries on to Malbun, so the museum slots neatly into a mountain day. My plan would be the museum at 08:00, the Walserhaus with a guide, then on to Masescha, the first Walser hamlet, with its chapel of St Theodul. Everything else in the village is in my guide to Triesenberg.

To see how this museum fits with the ones in the valley, there’s my guide to Liechtenstein’s museums.