Piz Gloria

"Piz Gloria" is the name of the revolving restaurant on the Schilthorn near Mürren in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland. The aerial tramway station and the restaurant were built by a Bernese architect, Konrad Wolf. The restaurant claims to be the "world's first revolving restaurant", [ [http://www.schilthorn.ch/index.php?uid=12 Schilthornbahn AG: Schilthorn - Piz Gloria ] ] although others had been built previously, such as the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington, which opened at the Century 21 Exposition in 1962. [ [http://www.spaceneedle.com/discover/history.html Space Needle | Discover the Needle > History ] ] The world's highest revolving restaurant is the Metro-Alpin at 3500m at the top of the Saas-Fee gondola lift. The Piz Gloria at the top of the Schilthorn above Muerren lies at 2970m. Switzerland has a third, and newer, revolving restaurant above Leysin in canton Vaud called Le Kuklos.

Because of the difficult conditions, construction units had to be prefabricated to a large extent. The outer skin of the all-round glass upper floor consists of aluminium-skinned wooden panels, originally an aluminum-coated tent roof. There is a turning mechanism so that all guests have views: around a core of 12 m diameter, a 3 m annulus takes approximately one hour to complete one rotation.

The panoramic restaurant is considered a pioneering achievement in tourist buildings, bearing witness to the spirit of the time of the 1960s. The mountain restaurant was enlarged around 1990 to hold approximately 400 diners, but kept its original character.

In the James Bond novel "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", Blofeld's hideout was a mountain-top building named "Piz Gloria". The movie production team found the building part-way through its construction, and contributed financially to completion of the restaurant in return for having exclusive use during filming. The restaurant retained the name of the James Bond location, and to this day acknowledges the significant contribution to its reputation, with a James Bond exhibition in the lower floor of the building showing clips from the film.

References

External links

* [http://www.schilthorn.ch/index.php?uid=39 - Piz Gloria]
* [http://www.swisspanorama.com/ Live Webcam at Schilthorn]