Zermatt

Where it sits. Zermatt fills the floor of the upper Mattertal at 1,608 metres, at the very head of a long valley that runs south from the Rhone at Visp into the highest corner of the canton of Valais. The village is hemmed in on both sides, and the Matter Vispa runs grey and fast through the middle of it. What everybody comes for stands at the end of the street: the Matterhorn, 4,478 metres, an isolated four-sided pyramid of gneiss on the Italian border, framed almost perfectly by the valley walls when you look south from the Bahnhofstrasse. Around it stand some of the highest summits in the Alps, including Monte Rosa, whose Dufourspitze at 4,634 metres is the highest point in Switzerland, and the ice of the Gorner glacier system.

1865 and what it cost. Zermatt was a poor farming parish until British climbers arrived in the 1850s and made the Hotel Monte Rosa, opened in 1839, their base. The Matterhorn was the last of the great Alpine peaks to be climbed, and the race for it ended on 14 July 1865, when Edward Whymper reached the summit by the Hornli ridge with six companions. On the descent the rope broke below the shoulder and four men fell to their deaths on the Matterhorn glacier: Douglas Hadow, Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas and the guide Michel Croz. The accident made the mountain notorious across Europe and made Zermatt's reputation at the same time. The graves are in the mountaineers' cemetery beside the parish church of St Mauritius, and the broken rope itself is displayed in the Matterhorn Museum, built underground beneath the village square.

On screen. The Matterhorn's silhouette is one of the most reproduced shapes on earth, from the Toblerone wrapper to theme-park architecture, and the link is traceable. Walt Disney shot the 1959 adventure Third Man on the Mountain in and around Zermatt, using the Matterhorn as the fictional Citadel and filming the village streets and the Hornli approach; the production so impressed him that he built the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland the same year, modelled on the peak he had just filmed. Earlier, the 1938 Anglo-German production about Whymper's ascent worked here as well. Hindi cinema arrived in the 1990s, when Swiss mountains replaced the Kashmir valleys that had become unusable for filming, and Zermatt joined Interlaken and Engelberg on the Indian coach circuit; the Gornergrat platform, with the Matterhorn behind it, is one of the most photographed spots in the country for that market.

A village without cars. Zermatt banned combustion vehicles in 1961 and has kept the rule, so the streets carry small electric taxis, luggage carts and horse-drawn sledges in winter. Visitors drive to Tasch, five kilometres down the valley, leave the car in the multi-storey there and take the shuttle train, which runs every twenty minutes and takes twelve. The result is a village that is dense, walkable and much quieter than its visitor numbers suggest. Behind the modern hotel fronts, the Hinterdorf quarter preserves a cluster of timber granaries and byres from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, raised on stone legs capped with flat discs to stop rodents climbing into the grain.

Getting above the village. Three systems climb out of Zermatt in different directions. The Gornergrat railway, opened in 1898 and the first fully electrified rack line in Europe, grinds up the eastern side to 3,089 metres in about thirty-three minutes, ending on a ridge that faces the Matterhorn across the Gorner glacier. The cable car to Matterhorn Glacier Paradise reaches 3,883 metres, the highest cable-car station in Europe, with an ice palace cut into the glacier and skiing that runs all summer; since 2023 a linked crossing continues over the ridge to Cervinia in Italy year round. On the western side, the Sunnegga funicular and the Rothorn lifts open the sunny slope where the Five Lakes walk passes tarns that hold the classic reflected-Matterhorn shot.

Getting there and timing. From Visp on the main Rhone valley line, trains take about an hour and ten minutes up the Mattertal; Zermatt is also the eastern terminus of the Glacier Express to St Moritz. Hiking season runs from late June to early October, ski season from late November to late April with glacier skiing beyond it. Morning is the time to look at the mountain: cloud almost always forms on the Italian side and drifts over the summit by early afternoon.