Zermatt bans combustion-engine cars to protect its view of the Matterhorn
In Zermatt, cars with combustion engines are banned so that exhaust haze never dims the view of the Matterhorn. Visitors arrive by train, then ride almost silent electric taxis, buses and hotel shuttles, or even horse-drawn carriages. Everything in town is at most a thirty-minute walk away.
Until the mid-nineteenth century this was a farming village at the head of the Matter valley, 1,620 metres up. Then British climbers arrived. In 1865 Edward Whymper's party made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, one of the last major Alpine peaks to be climbed, and the descent turned to disaster: only three of the seven climbers survived. The fame that followed set off a rush on the surrounding summits and a wave of hotel building. Today about half the jobs in town are in hotels or restaurants, and tourists can outnumber the roughly 5,800 residents several times over.
The name comes from the valley's meadows, matten in German; Zur Matte, at the meadow, first shows up on a map in 1495. Older maps used Praborno, a Romance name that also means meadow, which faded as German-speaking settlers replaced Romance speakers. Just over a third of today's permanent residents were born in Zermatt, while another third came from outside Switzerland.
The setting is extreme. Most of the Alps' 4,000-metre peaks rise around Zermatt or in nearby valleys, including Switzerland's highest summit, Dufourspitze on Monte Rosa. More than 85 percent of the municipality's land is unproductive rock and ice. The Gornergrat rack railway, Europe's highest open-air line, climbs to 3,089 metres, and lifts reach the Klein Matterhorn at 3,883 metres, with links across the glacier to Cervinia in Italy.
Altitude has long allowed skiing through summer. In August 2026, however, persistent heat, warm nights, storms and worsening glacier conditions forced the resort to suspend summer skiing, the second such closure in recent years after 2022.
Source: Zermatt
