Brienz/Brinzauls (Romansh: Brinzauls) is a village and a former municipality in the district of Albula in the canton of Graubünden in Switzerland.

[1] The majority of the population speaks Swiss German, with a large Romansh-speaking minority.

[2] On 9 May 2023, all residents were ordered to evacuate the village due to the determination by geologists that 2,000,000 cubic metres (71,000,000 cu ft) of rock from the mountain above was expected to collapse into the valley that includes the village.

A researcher at the University of Cambridge attributed the impending collapse, expected within a week to 24 days, to climate change that is driving glacier melt in the Alps.

[5] Simon Löw, emeritus professor of Engineering Geology at ETH Zurich, disputed a link to climate change, citing the lack of thawing permafrost and any correlation between annual rainfall and the speed at which the slope slides.

There was, as predicted, a massive rockfall on the night of 15–16 June 2023 which stopped just before the village, with no damage reported to the buildings.

[8] On November 9, 2024, it was announced that there was a serious fear of the collapse of about 5 million cubic meters of land, and an urgent need for an emergency evacuation of the village.

Of the rest of the land, 2.1% is settled (buildings or roads) and the remainder (24.3%) is non-productive (rivers, glaciers or mountains).

[10] The village is located north of the Albula River on the road from Lenzerheide to Davos.

It is a Haufendorf (an irregular, unplanned and quite closely packed village, built around a central square) on a terrace to the north and above the river.