Villages Without Cars

In the Swiss Alps, I Explore an Automobile-Free Paradise

// When you think about it, there are very few inhabited places in the world that haven't been touched by automobile traffic. The empire of internal combustion and asphalt has stretched its tendrils into virtually every hamlet and outpost, no matter how small, on the globe. The few exceptions are those places whose unique geography militates against driving. Islands, for example, like Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, which has no bridge connection to Michigan, and where horse-drawn carriages are still the norm. The center of Dubrovnik, whose narrow streets are huddled within medieval walls. And, most famously, Venice, where the streets are canals and the city buses are vaporetti.

I once spent a week in Switzerland's most famous car-free village, Zermatt, which serves as a gateway to the best-known of the Alps, the shark-fin-shaped Matterhorn. I was researching a chapter of a book that became The End of Elsewhere, about the impact of mass tourism on cultures and the environment. Zermatt, elevation 1,620 metres, was an excellent case study, because it has been a destination for tourists, starting with English and German mountaineers, since the 19th century. As expected, I found it to be highly commercialized, with touristy fondue restaurants, McDonald's and other fast-food joints, high-end shops and over one hundred hotels (most of them well beyond my limited means—I ended up renting a space in an attic, reached by a ladder, and where I inevitably conked my head on a rafter when I woke up too abruptly).

Before arriving, I hadn't registered the fact that there was no road into Zermatt. I came from Brig aboard the Glacier Express, a rack railway that dropped me off in the village's main drag, the Bahnoffstrasse; but drivers had to leave their cars at a vast parking lot in the village of Täsch, elevation 1,449 metres, and take a shuttle bus or narrow-gauge cog railway to Zermatt.