Located in a basin, surrounded by the high, rocky cliffs of the Gemmi pass, Leukerbad, or Loèche-les-Bains for the French-speaking Swiss, is the largest spa resort in Switzerland. It’s an extremely picturesque place for some, inauspicious for others. “Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here,” wrote James Baldwin in 1953, adding that “the landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach.”