Furka Pass

Where it sits. The Furka Pass crosses the main chain of the Alps at 2,429 metres, joining Gletsch in the Goms valley of Valais with Realp in the canton of Uri. It is a genuine hydrological divide: water falling on the western side reaches the Mediterranean by way of the Rhône, water on the eastern side reaches the North Sea by way of the Reuss, the Aare and the Rhine. The pass is treeless, rocky and open, and its western approach is one of the most dramatic pieces of road engineering in Switzerland, climbing in long exposed hairpins across a slabby granite flank with the Rhône Glacier immediately opposite. Together with the Grimsel to the west and the Susten to the north, it forms the three-pass circuit that is the classic Alpine driving and cycling loop.

Road, glacier and hotel. The carriage road over the Furka opened in 1866 as part of the Habsburg-era push to link the Rhône valley with central Switzerland, and it was designed for horses, which is why the gradient is steady rather than steep and the hairpins are generously radiused. The Hotel Belvédère, built in 1882 on the hairpin directly above the glacier tongue, became the pass's landmark and, in the end, its most eloquent monument: when it opened, guests stepped almost directly onto the ice. The Rhône Glacier has since retreated well over a kilometre and hundreds of metres in height, the hotel closed to guests in the mid-2010s, and the ice grotto — a tunnel cut roughly a hundred metres into the glacier and renewed every spring, with white fleece blankets laid over the surface in an attempt to slow the summer melt — now requires a walk up from the road. It is the single most photographed illustration of Alpine glacier loss in Europe.

On screen. The Furka's place in film history was fixed in a single summer. Goldfinger (1964, Guy Hamilton) sends James Bond into Switzerland on the trail of Auric Goldfinger, and the pursuit was shot on these hairpins: Sean Connery's Aston Martin DB5, registration BMT 216A, tailing Goldfinger's Rolls-Royce Phantom III with Oddjob at the wheel, and Tilly Masterson's white Ford Mustang cutting in on the same road. The confrontation in which Bond uses the DB5's extending wheel-hub blades to shred the Mustang's tyre was staged on the western ramp, with the Rhône Glacier filling the background — at the time still a wall of ice, which makes the sequence an accidental glaciological record. The production's Swiss work continued elsewhere in the country: the exterior of Goldfinger's Auric Enterprises plant was the Pilatus aircraft works at Stans. The Furka sequence made the DB5 the most famous car in cinema and made this road a permanent pilgrimage for drivers.

What you actually see today. The summit itself is a small saddle with a hotel, a car park and a view east down the Urseren valley. The real interest is either side. On the Valais ramp, the Belvédère hairpin, the glacier grotto and the meltwater lake at the snout occupy an hour. On the Uri side, at Realp, sits the Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway: the original mountain line of 1926 was abandoned in 1982 when the 15.4-kilometre Furka Base Tunnel opened beneath it, and volunteers spent nearly thirty years relaying track, rebuilding stations and returning the route to service, reaching Gletsch again in 2010. Several of its locomotives were repatriated from Vietnam in 1990, where they had been sold in the 1940s. The line's Steffenbach bridge is folded up and dismantled every autumn to save it from avalanches, then rebuilt each spring — one of the very few bridges in the world designed to be taken down annually.

Getting there and timing. The pass road, part of route 19, is open from roughly mid-June until the first serious snowfall in October; outside those months traffic uses the base tunnel car-carrying train between Realp and Oberwald. PostBus services cross the pass in summer, linking Andermatt with Gletsch and Oberwald. Cyclists face 2,429 metres of altitude and a long, unshaded western ramp, and the pass is a regular feature of the Tour de Suisse. The road is narrow in places, with buses taking the whole width on the hairpins, and it is at its most enjoyable before nine in the morning, when the motorcyclists who dominate it in high summer are still at breakfast.