About Zermatt

The mountain that made the village

Walser settlers farmed this high valley from the 13th century, and their heritage still stands in the old quarter — dark larch houses and mazots, little granaries perched on stone discs to keep the mice out. Zermatt might have stayed a farming hamlet forever, but for the pyramid at the end of the valley.

On 14 July 1865, Edward Whymper's party made the first ascent of the Matterhorn; four of the seven died on the descent when a rope broke, and the story electrified the world. The tragedy — told movingly in the village's Matterhorn Museum, along with that very rope — launched alpine tourism almost overnight. The Gornergrat cogwheel railway followed in 1898, and Zermatt never looked back.

A village without cars

Zermatt banned combustion cars decades ago and never relented. Visitors leave vehicles at the Matterhorn Terminal in Täsch, five kilometres down-valley, and ride the shuttle train in twelve minutes; inside the village, tiny electric taxis and hotel carts hum along lanes built for mules. The silence is the first thing visitors notice — that, and the air.

Life centres on the Bahnhofstrasse, which fills each evening with skiers, mountaineers, and strollers moving between fondue parlours, watch boutiques, and gear shops. Twice a day in summer, a herd of black-nosed sheep-farming heritage walks straight through town: Zermatt remains, underneath everything, a Valais mountain village of about 5,800 people.

38 four-thousanders

Zermatt is ringed by 38 peaks over 4,000 metres — more than anywhere else in the Alps, including Switzerland's highest, Monte Rosa. The Gornergrat railway climbs to 3,089 m for the definitive Matterhorn-and-glacier panorama; the cable cars to the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise reach 3,883 m, Europe's highest lift station, with its ice palace and year-round glacier skiing — 360 km of pistes in winter, some runs descending into Italy.

Summer belongs to the trails: 400 km of them, from the gentle Five Lakes Walk — where the Stellisee mirrors the Matterhorn at dawn — to the Gorner Gorge walkways and the mountaineers' routes guided by the Alpin Center, whose guides have led climbs since 1865.

Eating and timing

Valais food is made for mountain evenings: raclette scraped from the wheel, fondue, dried meat from the high valleys, Cholera — a savoury vegetable pie born of quarantine days — and crisp Fendant wine from Europe's highest vineyards down the valley. Zermatt also has, improbably, one of the Alps' greatest concentrations of fine-dining and famous slope-side restaurants above Findeln.

Ski season runs December to April (and on the glacier, all year); July to September is hiking prime time; late autumn is the quiet, locals' season. All journeys come via Visp — about 3.5 hours from Zurich Airport, 4 from Geneva — with the final hour on the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn climbing 1,000 metres into the valley. Or arrive the slow, glorious way: the Glacier Express ends its eight-hour panoramic run from St. Moritz right at Zermatt's front door.

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