🇨🇭 Switzerland · Valais and the south
There are few mountains as recognisable on the planet as the Matterhorn: that almost perfect rock pyramid, 4.478 metres high, standing alone above the village of Zermatt. It is the silhouette on Toblerone chocolate, the emblem of Switzerland as a whole, and seeing it appear for the first time at the end of the Mattertal valley is one of those images you do not forget. Zermatt, at its foot, is a mountain village of narrow streets, dark wooden chalets and legendary hotels, free of cars, which has lived off mountaineering and skiing for more than a century and a half.
Zermatt does not pretend otherwise: it is expensive, it is exclusive and it knows it. But it is also an authentic village, with its old quarter of wooden granaries on stilts (the Hinterdörfli), its mountaineers' cemetery where those who died attempting these summits rest, and a mountain culture you can feel on every corner. And up above, the magic: the Gornergrat rack railway, which climbs to 3.089 metres to one of the most famous views in the world; the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, the highest cable car station in Europe at 3.883 metres; summer skiing on the glacier; and even the chance to cross by cable car into Cervinia, in Italy.
This guide covers Zermatt with a practical, honest eye: how to reach a village with no cars, how much the trains and cable cars really cost (a lot), which hikes and viewpoints are worth every franc, how to make the most of the Swiss Travel Pass and what to book in advance. Zermatt is a luxury, yes, but it is also one of those places where the mountains come so close it makes you dizzy. It is worth understanding how to get around so you can enjoy it without surprises.
Zermatt began as a shepherds' village of Walser origin, the Germanic settlers who populated the high Valais valleys in the Middle Ages. For centuries it was a poor and isolated corner, until in the 19th century mountaineering changed everything: on 14 July 1865, the Briton Edward Whymper made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, a feat overshadowed by the tragedy of the descent, when the rope broke and four members of the expedition fell to their deaths. That drama went round the world and turned Zermatt into the mecca of mountaineering. The arrival of the railway from Visp in 1891 and of the Gornergrat train in 1898, plus the early decision to ban cars, did the rest. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The alpine and Mediterranean south of Switzerland: the Rhône valley and the bishopric of Sion, the Matterhorn of Zermatt conquered in 1865, Italian Ticino that was a subject land of the Confederation, and the Romansh Engadine where St. Moritz invented winter tourism.
Read the history of Valais and the south →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before mountaineering, before the luxury hotels and the cable cars, Zermatt was barely a handful of farms at the end of a dead-end valley. Its first permanent inhabitants were the Walser, a German-speaking people who between the 12th and 13th centuries migrated from the upper Rhône valley (the Goms region, in Upper Valais) towards the highest and roughest valleys of the Alps. Hardy settlers, used to altitude and cold, they cleared pastures where nobody lived and brought their language with them, Walliserdeutsch, whose local variety is still spoken in Zermatt.
The name itself tells that peasant story. The place is documented in the Middle Ages as 'Pratoborno', and later as 'zer Matte' or 'zur Matte', which in German means 'at the meadow' or 'by the meadow': from that came Zermatt. For centuries it was a community of mountain shepherds and farmers, poor and isolated, living off cows, cheese and whatever crops the altitude allowed. Winter cut it off and survival was hard.
A precious testimony to that pre-tourism Zermatt survives in the heart of the village: the Hinterdorf, the old quarter, with its dark wooden granaries and stables (the Stadel) raised on stone pillars topped by large flat slabs. That detail was not decorative: the slabs stopped mice climbing up to the grain stored above. Some of those buildings are centuries old and form one of the best preserved alpine rural ensembles in Switzerland, a reminder that this glamorous destination grew out of the subsistence economy of a forgotten valley.
Above that silent village rose, imposing and feared, the Matterhorn. For the people of Zermatt it was not an object of desire but a threatening presence: they believed, as in so many alpine valleys, that demons and spirits lived on its unreachable summits. It occurred to nobody to climb it. That would change abruptly in the mid-19th century, when a new kind of traveller arrived from northern Europe with what was then a revolutionary idea: climbing mountains for sport.
In the mid-19th century, the Alps came into fashion. A generation of British mountaineers, many of them scientists, lawyers and clergymen with time and money, began arriving in Switzerland determined to conquer the great summits. It was the so-called 'golden age of alpinism', which began around 1854 and in little more than a decade saw almost every important mountain in the Alps fall, one after another. The Alpine Club, founded in London in 1857, gave that impulse its shape. Zermatt, at the foot of the most spectacular and difficult summit of all, became the headquarters of those pioneers and the village where the first hotels and a caste of local guides flourished.
The Matterhorn was the last great trophy, and the most feared. Its pyramidal shape, almost vertical on every side, looked impossible. For years, two men became obsessed with it from opposite sides. On the Swiss side, from Zermatt, the English engraver and illustrator Edward Whymper, who had come to the Alps to draw mountains and ended up caught by the ambition of topping the Matterhorn: he tried again and again, failing on several expeditions. On the Italian side, from Valtournenche and Breuil (today Cervinia), the guide Jean-Antoine Carrel, born in 1829 at the foot of the mountain, an extraordinary climber who considered the Cervino 'his' mountain and dreamed of conquering it for the pride of the young Kingdom of Italy.
Whymper and Carrel even tried it together, but rivalry and questions of national pride eventually set them against each other. In the summer of 1865, Whymper discovered that Carrel had secretly organised an Italian expedition on the southern ridge (the Lion ridge) with the backing of the Italian Alpine Club. Feeling betrayed and fearing the Italians would top out first, Whymper hurried to Zermatt to throw together a rope team on the Hörnli ridge, the Swiss side, until then thought unfeasible but which he sensed could be climbed. The race was on: two teams, two countries, one summit.
On 13 July 1865, Edward Whymper set out from Zermatt at the head of a rope team of seven men. With him were three Britons — the Reverend Charles Hudson, an experienced mountaineer; the young and inexperienced Douglas Hadow, barely nineteen; and the aristocrat Lord Francis Douglas —, the great Chamonix guide Michel Croz, and two local Zermatt guides: Peter Taugwalder senior and his son of the same name. They climbed the Hörnli ridge and bivouacked on the mountain. The next day, 14 July 1865, at about 1.40 in the afternoon, they reached the summit. Whymper and Croz arrived at the top together. They had won the race: from above, Whymper saw Carrel's Italian party still far from the summit on the southern side, and threw stones to make himself noticed. The Matterhorn, the last great virgin mountain in the Alps, had been conquered from Zermatt.
The triumph did not last. On the descent, barely an hour after the summit, catastrophe struck. The seven were coming down roped together when young Hadow, the least experienced, slipped and fell onto Croz, who was ahead of him, dragging him with him. The jolt also pulled down Hudson and Lord Douglas. The rope linking that group to the three above — Whymper and the two Taugwalders — snapped taut and broke at its weakest section. The four men plunged down the north face, sliding on their backs and trying in vain to grab the rock, and disappeared one after another towards the Matterhorn glacier, almost 1.200 metres below.
Whymper and the two local guides, frozen in place, hung on the mountain unable to do anything. It took them hours to resume the descent, shattered by the horror. Only three of the seven returned alive to Zermatt. Three of the four bodies were later recovered; that of Lord Francis Douglas never appeared, and it is thought he remained trapped forever high on the Matterhorn. The most celebrated conquest of the golden age of alpinism had become, in a matter of minutes, its most famous tragedy.
The news travelled across Europe and caused a scandal. How could the three survivors — Whymper and the Taugwalders — come away unhurt while the other four died? An appalling suspicion soon spread: that someone above had deliberately cut the rope so as not to be dragged into the void. Suspicion fell above all on Peter Taugwalder senior. On a continent that was starting to read about mountaineering in the newspapers, the Matterhorn drama became a matter of honour and public opinion.
The Valais authorities opened a formal investigation in Zermatt. Examining the facts and, above all, the rope itself was key. It was found that the section that had broken was not the good climbing rope the party carried for difficult passages, but an old rope, thinner and weaker, a simple spare line that should never have joined the men in such an exposed place. That inadequate rope had snapped under the pull of four falling bodies: it had not been cut. The inquiry found no evidence of foul play and the survivors were cleared.
Even so, the shadow of suspicion followed Peter Taugwalder senior for the rest of his life. Whymper himself, who in his famous book 'Scrambles Amongst the Alps' (1871) left the canonical account of the ascent, argued that the rope had broken by itself, but his testimony left the guide in an ambiguous position he never managed to shake off; Taugwalder emigrated to America for a time, hurt by the discredit, before returning to die in the valley. That fatal fragment of rope is kept today in the Matterhorn Museum – Zermatlantis in Zermatt, and it remains the relic that best sums up the mountain's double face: glory and death. The tragedy, far from frightening travellers away, multiplied the fame of the Matterhorn and of Zermatt, which were bound together forever in the imagination of world mountaineering.
The conquest of 1865 put Zermatt on the world map, but it was the railway that made possible the tourist destination we know. Until then, reaching the village was an ordeal: from Visp, in the Rhône valley, you had to climb on foot or by mule for about nine hours. In 1891 the narrow-gauge railway between Visp and Zermatt opened, cutting the journey to barely two and a half hours and throwing the valley open to the mass tourism of the day. The grand hotels — the Zermatterhof, the Mont Cervin — filled with British, German and other European travellers.
Success was so immediate that a few years later a second engineering marvel arrived: the Gornergrat railway, opened in 1898. It was the first fully electric rack railway in Switzerland and is still the oldest electric rack railway in operation in the world. It climbed — and still climbs — to the 3.089 metres of the Gornergrat, putting within reach of any visitor the head-on view of the Matterhorn and of some twenty four-thousanders that previously only climbers saw. Zermatt thus became a pioneer of mountain tourism.
One decision shaped the village's character forever: the ban on motor cars. Zermatt chose early on to stay free of combustion-engine cars, both to preserve the pure high-mountain air and to keep its alpine village atmosphere. That is why, to this day, anyone driving has to leave the car in Täsch, five kilometres before, and take a shuttle train; inside Zermatt only small electric vehicles and carts move about. That choice, maintained over generations, is an essential part of the place's identity and a rarity visitors are grateful for.
Through the 20th century, Zermatt completed its transformation into an alpine capital: it covered itself with cable cars and lifts, developed one of the best ski areas in the Alps — with summer skiing on the glacier 365 days a year — and established itself as one of the most prestigious and expensive mountain destinations on the planet, without entirely losing the wooden village it once was.
The mountain that made Zermatt famous is changing before our eyes. The Matterhorn, like all the Alps, is suffering the impact of global warming. Its glaciers — the great Gornergletscher seen from the Gornergrat, the Theodul glacier where people ski in summer — are retreating at an accelerating rate, and with them changes the landscape that generations of travellers believed eternal. The melting of the Theodul glacier, in the pass between Switzerland and Italy, has been so intense that even the border line between the two countries, historically marked by the ice divide, has shifted and is now the subject of negotiations.
Less visible but just as worrying is the thawing of the permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that, at high altitude, acts as the cement holding the mountain's rock together. A scientific team installed a dense network of sensors on the Hörnli ridge for more than a decade, at about 3.500 metres — the same ridge of the first ascent — and documented with millions of data points how summer heat and heatwaves thaw that permafrost and multiply rockfalls. In recent summers, the authorities have temporarily closed the normal route up the Matterhorn during episodes of extreme heat, because of the danger of falling rock. The mountain is, literally, coming loose.
Even so, Zermatt is still one of the great destinations in the Alps and a tourism engine for Valais. The village has added spectacular attractions, such as the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise — the highest cable car station in Europe, at 3.883 metres — and, since 2023, the Matterhorn Alpine Crossing, the cable car crossing linking Switzerland with Cervinia, in Italy, without walking. The two faces of today's Zermatt live side by side: that of a luxury, high-tech destination topping glaciers with glass cabins, and that of a place watching, from the front row, the retreat of those same glaciers. The Matterhorn is still there, as photographed as ever, a symbol of Switzerland and a reminder that even mountains that look unchanging are changing.