The Valais municipality has been car-free for more than 60 years. If you want to get around the flood of tourists, you have to use a horse-drawn carriage, a bicycle or a whirring electric scooter.
Zermatt actually only has just under 5800 inhabitants, but anyone who sits down in a restaurant in the Valais mountain village soon realizes that the menus are multilingual and the guests are international and numerous. The Matterhorn has been attracting countless tourists to Zermatt for decades.
But why is the idyllic village actually car-free?
In 1931, there was still no passable road to Zermatt. The Valais had applied to the federal government for subsidies to build a road, as the canton had set itself the goal of providing every municipality with a passable access road.
This major project was to be spread over ten to 15 years.
A threat and a compromise
Some areas - including the villages in the Mattertal - feared that they would be disadvantaged. Because the project was already further advanced in the Saas Valley than in the Mattertal, St. Niklaus and Grächen demanded rapid implementation.
The road into the Mattertal was to be four meters wide. The project was approved by the municipalities and the district and was examined by the federal government. The residents were already eagerly awaiting the road.
However, the Visp-Zermatt Railway was against it and threatened to stop serving Zermatt in winter due to the high costs.
A compromise was found: the road was finally built, but closed to automobile traffic between St. Niklaus and Zermatt for 15 years in 1931. In addition, at the request of the Visp-Zermatt Railway (now the Matterhorn-Gotthard Railway), the Stalden-St. Niklaus route was only permitted for private vehicles and remained closed to passenger and freight transportation. For this reason, Zermatt became car-free - officially since 1961.
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