St. Peter's Anglican Church Château-d'Oex · Serving the English-speaking Community Since 1899

English Churches in Switzerland

From the 1840s the English built churches and chapels wherever they wintered, climbed and took the cure — more than twenty of them across Switzerland, most now closed, sold, or serving another congregation. St. Peter’s, Château-d’Œx, is one of the survivors, and it holds an unusually complete record of the whole phenomenon: why they came, where they settled for the season, and what became of the buildings they left behind.

This page is the index to that record. Each church is listed under its canton, with the questions its own page answers beneath it. Every answer lives on the page it belongs to, so there is one address per subject and nothing to fall out of step; where a specific rests on a single source, that page names it.

Some of these churches are poorly documented, and a few have been demolished with little trace. If you hold photographs, records, or family connections to any of them, the parish would be glad to hear from you.

The phenomenon

Why the English came to the Alps

Who built the Montreux Riviera?

What did the English do all winter?

Where did the English send their children to school?

Canton of Vaud

Aigle — St. John the Evangelist

Bex-les-Bains — English Church

Caux — St. Michael and All Angels

Château-d’Œx — St. Peter’s

Clarens — Christ Church

Glion — English Chapel

Lausanne — Christ Church

Lausanne-Ouchy — Temple de la Croix d’Ouchy

Les Avants — English Chapel

Les Diablerets — English Church

Leysin — English Chapel

Mont-Pèlerin — English Chapel

Montreux — St. John’s Anglican Church

Vevey — All Saints

Villars — English Church (now the Aiglon College Chapel)

Canton of Bern

Interlaken — English Chapel (in the monastery church)

Meiringen — English Church

Mürren — English Church

Wengen — St. Bernard’s

Canton of Geneva

Geneva — Holy Trinity

Canton of Valais

Arolla — St. George’s

Belalp — Church of the Good Shepherd

Chandolin — English Chapel (chapelle des Daillettes)

Zermatt — St. Peter’s

Canton of Grisons

Pontresina — Holy Trinity

English services without a church

Not every place where the English worshipped built something. In the resorts a Sunday service was often simply an amenity of the hotel, advertised alongside the telephone and the sulphur spring, and taken by whichever clergyman was staying that month. Four such places in the Canton of Vaud turned up in the digitised press in July 2026, and none of them has a page here, because in each case what the evidence supports is a service rather than a building:

  • La Comballaz, above Aigle, where the Hôtel de la Couronne advertised “culte anglais” from 1 May to 1 October — attested in 1893 and again, in a different paper, in May 1895.
  • Les Rasses, above Sainte-Croix, where in January 1911 the town’s official weekly list of services carried, between the National and Catholic churches, an “English Church Service” at the Hôtel du Mont-Blanc — Morning Prayer, Holy Communion and sermon at half past ten, Evening Prayer at half past five, taken by the Revd Q. A. Bienenmann, M.A.
  • Chexbres, listed in resort promotion of 1910 and 1911 as offering “culte protestant et culte anglais”.
  • Morges, where in May 1925 a notice in English and French offered a service “if no less than eight (8) persons can be expected to be present”, at which the hopes for a boys’ home and “a small English Church for Morges” would be explained. Whether anything came of it, we do not know.

We record them here rather than on pages of their own because calling a hotel drawing room a church would overstate what the sources say.

Where the evidence sits

The fullest single account of one parish is the heritage of St. Peter’s, 1866–1919. The contemporary newspaper reports of the First World War internments at Château-d’Œx are published in full, and free to read, in the Château-d’Œx press archive. The parish’s own story — its consecration in 1902, the internment years, and its anniversaries — is told on the history of St. Peter’s.

If you hold information about any of these churches — photographs, records, family connections — the parish would be glad to hear from you at info(a)stpeters.ch.