Cultural Trips

The mountains of Europe are not empty. For millennia, they have been home to distinctive cultures — the Romansh speakers of the Swiss Engadin, the Ladins of the Dolomites, the Górale highlanders of the Tatras, the Byzantine shepherds of Crete — whose ways of life were shaped by and adapted to the extreme conditions of high-altitude living. At Red Fox Trails, our cultural itineraries are designed to connect our guests with these living traditions before they are lost entirely to the homogenizing forces of modernity.

Alpine Gastronomy

Mountain food is the product of necessity, ingenuity, and extraordinary local ingredients. In the Swiss Alps, we visit high-altitude Alpkäserei (alpine cheese dairies) where the milk of cows that have grazed on 50 different species of mountain flower produces cheeses of incomparable depth and complexity. In the Dolomites, we eat at rifugi (mountain huts) that serve Schlutzkrapfen (spinach and ricotta dumplings) and Speck (smoked ham) made according to centuries-old recipes.

In Crete, we spend an afternoon with a traditional beekeeper in the White Mountains, tasting thyme honey while the beekeeper explains the intimate relationship between the highland flora and the bees that pollinate it. In Slovenia, we visit a family winery in the Soča Valley, tasting wines made from indigenous grape varieties that were nearly lost during the communist period and are now being revived by a new generation of winemakers.

Artisanal Crafts

In the Val Gardena (Selva di Val Gardena) in the Dolomites, the tradition of wood carving has been practiced without interruption since the 17th century. We visit working studios where master carvers — some of whose families have been carving for 10 generations — create figures of extraordinary fineness from Arolla pine and Swiss stone pine. In Zakopane, we meet Górale craftspeople who still make traditional leather shoes (kierpce), embroidered waistcoats, and hand-carved furniture according to methods unchanged for 300 years.

Historical Sites & Living History

Our cultural trails always integrate the historical dimension of the landscapes we move through. In the Dolomites, we walk the First World War battlefields of the Cinque Torri and the Lagazuoi, visiting the extraordinary tunnels and galleries carved at 2,500m by Italian soldiers in 1915-18. In Cyprus, we spend half a day with an icon painter who has studied the Byzantine technique in Greece and now works in the tradition of the great medieval fresco painters.

In the Maramureș region of Romania, we attend a Sunday church service in one of the UNESCO-listed wooden churches, observing a religious tradition that has continued without interruption since the 17th century — and which, in its music, its vestments, and its community, provides a direct window into the past.