LAAX: the back story

About LAAX: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Flims, Laax and Falera share a sunny plateau above the Rhine Gorge, in the Romansh-speaking Surselva. Their ski area grew from a single mountain railway up Crap Sogn Gion into one of the largest in Switzerland, and a hand-shaped halfpipe in 1985 started the freestyle story that still defines LAAX.

Three villages on a plateau

Flims, Laax and Falera sit side by side on a sunny shelf of the Surselva, the Romansh-speaking upper Rhine valley, above the deep Rhine Gorge. Behind them rises the Tectonic Arena Sardona, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with the Flimserstein above Flims.

Flims has welcomed visitors for well over a century. The family that runs the Romantik Hotel Schweizerhof in Flims Waldhaus tells how an ancestor won the old Segnes inn at a game of Jass, the Swiss card game, in 1869; the family has run its hotels in Flims ever since.

In 1985 the first halfpipe in LAAX was shaped by hand: two metres high, fifty long.

A mountain and a merger

The ski area grew from Crap Sogn Gion, the 2,252-metre “Stone of St. John” above Laax, first opened up by a mountain railway that the lift company celebrated fifty years on in 2012. In 1996 the Crap Sogn Gion lift company of Laax and the Flims lift company merged into the Weisse Arena Group, and the two sides became one resort: today 216 km of pistes and 30 lifts between 1,100 and 3,018 metres on the Vorab Glacier.

The freestyle capital

LAAX’s first halfpipe opened in 1985, two metres high and fifty long, shaped by hand. In 2014 the resort opened what it calls the world’s largest halfpipe in permanent operation, 200 metres long and 6.9 metres high, and in 2015 the Burton European Open became the LAAX OPEN, which the resort calls Europe’s most prestigious freestyle contest. Five snowparks with more than 90 obstacles spread around Crap Sogn Gion, and the rocksresort, a cluster of stone cubes at the Laax valley station, grew to 13 buildings and 248 apartments by 2025.

A greener mountain

Since 2010 LAAX has run its Greenstyle programme, made a foundation in 2016, to protect the region’s environment, and the new FlemXpress gondola has carried skiers from Flims up to Startgels in stages since December 2023.

Our advice: stay at the Laax valley station if you ride the parks, or in Flims Waldhaus for quiet hotels and forest walks; ski the 13 km run from La Siala down to Flims at least once, and spend an evening in the halfpipe area during the LAAX OPEN finals if you are here in January.

LAAX through the years

Milestones from the Weisse Arena Group’s history page, laax.com, flimslaax.com and the Schweizerhof Flims, read October 2026.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with LAAX: the back story before you go.