Arosa to Replace 40-Year-Old Hörnli Lifts With New Gondola and Chair

Arosa is preparing the largest single investment in its history: a full rebuild of the Hörnli sector, where its 40-year-old gondola and 30-year-old chairlift both come out.

The Hörnli area matters beyond its own terrain. It's where Arosa connects to Lenzerheide via the Urdenbahn tramway, the link that turned the two resorts into a combined 225-kilometre ski area when they joined in 2014. Arosa Bergbahnen's case for a rebuild on this scale rests on that connection - bottlenecks here ripple across the entire linked system, not just the local slopes.

Two lifts coming out, higher capacity going in

The six-passenger Hörnli-Express gondola dates to 1986 and currently climbs 664 vertical metres over 3,107 metres of line in around eleven minutes, moving roughly 2,000 people an hour on 25 towers. Its replacement is a new 10-passenger gondola on the same alignment, cutting the tower count to 13, with a faster 9-minute-30 run and capacity up to roughly 2,400 people an hour. The new cabins will carry bikes as well, extending the lift's usefulness into summer.

The 1994 quad chair gets the same treatment. It currently runs from around 2,150 to 2,499 metres in four and a half minutes, carrying 2,400 people an hour. Its replacement is an eight-passenger, bubble-equipped high-speed chairlift with a new, lower base station - a change that opens up a longer descent for skiers rather than just swapping old machinery for new.

Travel time drops to three minutes fifty, and capacity rises to around 3,000 people an hour. The new upper station will sit beside the gondola's mountain station, with the two lifts running parallel along most of the hill.

Slopes and snowmaking, not just lifts

The lift upgrades are the headline, but Arosa Bergbahnen is treating this as a sector-wide rebuild rather than a straight swap. Several pistes in the Hörnli area will be realigned, and snowmaking coverage is being expanded across the sector - work aimed at making the area more reliable through the winter and more useful in summer, alongside the lifts themselves.

The relocated chairlift base station also needs its own supporting infrastructure, including a new access road, which is factored into the same project rather than treated as a separate cost later.

Cost and timeline

The full project - lifts, piste work and snowmaking together - now carries a price tag of roughly CHF 67 million, the largest single investment in the company's history. That figure has moved: as far back as October 2024, Arosa Bergbahnen's own board minutes put the cost at "at least CHF 55 million," with the current CHF 67 million reflecting a more developed plan rather than scope creep on an already-announced number.

Preparatory work worth around CHF 4 million is already budgeted for the 2026-27 season - piste corrections, snowmaking upgrades and site prep - with the main construction window set for summer 2028 and the new lifts targeted to open that December. All of it sits within the resort's existing ski-area boundary, and the current lifts keep running while the groundwork goes in.

Both new installations are designed to run without on-site operating staff, and the station architecture - designed with Studio F. A. Porsche - is being positioned as a visual identity change for the sector as much as a mechanical one. It's a detail that signals Arosa is treating Hörnli as a flagship project rather than routine lift replacement, and it's consistent with the scale of the price tag attached to it.