Chenot Palace Weggis

Opened on 11 June 2020 on the shore of Lake Lucerne at Weggis, beneath Mount Rigi and about an hour from Zurich — the Chenot group's own flagship, and the first facility it built rather than occupied.

Henri Chenot laid the foundations of his method at a Cannes clinic in 1974 and spent decades refining it in Merano before Weggis was built to house it properly. Catalan by birth and French by adoption, he trained in biology, psychology, Chinese medicine and naturopathy, and the method reflects all four: traditional Chinese principles paired with Western diagnostics, under a motto he repeated for fifty years — we don't treat disease, we treat wellness.

The scale is serious. A 5,000-square-metre Medical Spa, 97 rooms and suites, and diagnostics among the most advanced in the sector. It has held World's Best Detox Programme for five consecutive years.

Now the part to understand before booking. The Chenot Diet is a fasting-mimicking protocol of roughly 850 calories a day, taken for the length of the programme. That is genuinely demanding, and it is the mechanism rather than an accompaniment to it. Guests arrive in bathrobes for breakfast and lunch, which tells you how completely the programme organises the day.

Anyone hoping to combine this with Swiss sightseeing, business calls or good dinners has misjudged it. Anyone wanting the most thoroughly engineered detox programme available, in surroundings that stay firmly on the luxury side of clinical, will find few equals.