Hotel Relais Castello di Morcote
Morcote, Switzerland · 5-star Hotel Steady pricing
Hotel Relais Castello di Morcote in photographs
Click any of them to see it full size.
When to go
The cheapest month we have found is December, at around USD 409 a night - -3% against what this hotel usually asks.
Where to book
- Book on Booking.com - Free cancellation options, guest reviews and a familiar checkout.
- Hotel website - Photos, facilities and location.
Our notes
A castle above one of Switzerland's prettiest villages
The Relais occupies the castle above Morcote, a fortified house that has watched over the village and its vineyards since the Middle Ages, with the lake dropping away directly below the terrace. What makes a stay here different from the village hotels below is the estate itself: the castle keeps its own vineyard on the slope beneath the walls, bottled under the Tenuta Castello di Morcote label, with a barrel cellar and a tasting room built into the hillside for guests who want to go from the vines to the glass without leaving the property. The rooms and lounges follow the same idea - heritage stonework and vaulted ceilings left as they were, furnished with contemporary pieces rather than a pastiche of the period, so the old and the new sit next to each other instead of competing.
The kitchen matches the setting: every course we had, from a beef tartare to a simple cheese plate, was genuinely well executed, not just well plated. None of this comes cheap
- prices here are Swiss prices, at the top of what this coast asks - but the combination
of the setting, the estate and the food is hard to find twice, and the charm of the place goes some way to justifying it. Morcote itself is regularly named one of Switzerland's most beautiful villages: a single arcaded lane running along the water, houses stacked up the hillside behind it, and none of the traffic that reaches Lugano proper twenty minutes up the shore. The climb to the Church of Santa Maria del Sasso - about 400 steps up from the piazza, past a Baroque interior and a cemetery terrace with one of the widest views on the lake - is the one walk in the village worth doing before breakfast, while it is still quiet.
Photographs: the hotel's own website, relaiscastellodimorcote.ch.
The area
Lake Lugano is smaller and quieter than Como or Maggiore next door, and it has the advantage of being entirely Swiss on one side and Italian on the other without either half feeling like a border town. Lugano itself is compact enough to see on foot: the arcaded old town around Piazza della Riforma, the lakeside promenade through Parco Ciani, and LAC, the glass cultural centre on the water that has turned the city into a genuine stop for contemporary art rather than just a stopover on the way to Milan.
Two funiculars go straight up from the centre - Monte San Salvatore and Monte Bre - and either one clears the lake haze on a clear day for a view that reaches to the Alps and, south, into Italy. A boat is the better way to see the rest of the lake: Gandria, a fishing village built directly into the cliff with no road wide enough for a car, is twenty minutes from Lugano by water, and the Isole di Brissago - a private botanical garden planted with subtropical species across two islets - make a full afternoon out of the trip. Morcote, at the lake's southern tip, is the same boat line's other end and the prettiest single village on the water, worth the full journey down even for those staying in Lugano itself.
What it costs through the year
| Cheapest we have seen | USD 387 ≈ €346 |
|---|---|
| What it usually costs | USD 420 ≈ €375 |
| Dearest we have seen | USD 431 ≈ €385 |
| Times we looked | 4 |
| Gap between the two | 11% |
| Last checked | 2026-10-24 |
