“Four of my friends are dead. Six of them… I don’t know where they are,” said 17-year-old Ebenezer Mehari from Crans, outside the police cordon around the Swiss nightclub Le Constellation, which was the site of a fire that killed 40 and injured more than a hundred in the early hours of the new year.
Mehari had been clubbing on New Year’s Eve with schoolfriends when he went upstairs from the basement to have a cigarette in the bar’s smoking area, shortly before 1.30am. Going back downstairs, he saw the flames take hold and heard screams. “I saw some old friends from school with their hair on fire and clothes burned off.”
Twelve hours after the inferno, the Crans-Montana resort still smelled of burning. Sulphurous and acrid, it wafted gently over us with the wind. The apartment block on top of the bar was obscured behind the grim village of forensic tents assembled around the entrance. The only visible evidence of fire was the peeling, sagging paint on the balcony four storeys up from the basement where the blaze started.
Le Constel, as it was known around town, was not a bar for tourists. Much of the time it served as a cheap haunt for young locals. “Some nights, it would just be me and my friends in there having beers,” said Mael, another 17-year-old who was present on New Year’s Eve.
“It was a kids’ club,” an older man said on the funicular ride up to the town: “14 to 20, even you would be too old for it,” he added, looking at me. The youngest victim was 14-years-old.
The disaster has cleaved the resort town in two: those who grieve and those who can only witness it. Nearly all of those I speak to who had been to the bar are local to the area or have been visiting the resort for years. They are a part of the community. “Everyone working here knows of someone who was involved,” a young ski instructor told me.
One guest at the Hôtel Royal found it all to be a dreadful inconvenience. On the evening of Friday 2 January, I saw her admonishing a small group of shocked journalists and mourners standing on the side road to the hotel from the window of her white Bentley SUV. “This is a road,” she repeated herself, increasingly shrill and indignant in her grating West Coast accent. “We know what happened here, but you need to move,” she shouted.
For a few, the scene and the media frenzy on New Year’s Day was a macabre tourist attraction: a chance to play correspondent. One tourist sheepishly took a photo of himself at the scene before moving on, another younger woman was on a FaceTime call showing the scene to her friend. For those in search of their 15 minutes of fame, all that matters is the spectacle and their own relationship to it.
An American tourist in a hot-pink ski suit with fluffy cuffs was only too keen to provide me with a comment. “I know it sounds bad to say, but it sounded like a really good firework… It was like ten times as loud as a regular firework,” she told me of the explosion that she had heard from her hotel room the previous night. She insisted that I took down her Instagram username. “I’ll be doing some more stuff on there,” she added.
As of writing, she hasn’t posted since the disaster happened. Perhaps the sobering reality of the situation had set in for her, as it had for others by the morning of 2 January. The number of flowers and candles swelled. Those standing silently outnumbered the journalists and camera crews around the scene.
Still, others further afield speculated wildly about the footage taken of the fire, a fact not lost on the town. “Seems the revelers [sic] prioritised filming the fire above their heads rather than grab a fire extinguisher,” read one X comment in response to a TV interview.
Lupo Guagliumi, a teenager who was at the bar that evening, alleged there weren’t any fire extinguishers behind the bar. “They were trying to put the fire out with shirts. It was just horrible,” he said.
As I descended the funicular to catch my train to Zurich on 3 January, I saw the reports of US strikes on Venezuela. Headlines move on. The cycle begins anew. A small town is left to grieve.
[Further reading: Five political trends to watch in 2026]
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