The legend of the Gotthard

Which is the best-known mountain in Switzerland? The Matterhorn is the usual answer. But which one best expresses the identity of Switzerland? Most Swiss would probably say the Gotthard.

The centre of the Alps. A symbol of a nation’s desire for independence and unity. A reminder of its courage and capacity for innovation. For the Swiss, no other place is as symbolically significant as the Gotthard massif. (It is worth noting that the Gotthard is a massif, not a mountain; there is no single mountain that bears that name.)

Soon the Gotthard will be crossable in a matter of minutes. The Gotthard base railway tunnel, the longest and deepest in the world, will be inaugurated at the beginning of June 2016. To travel the 57 km by train will take 20 minutes or so. It will be 20 minutes under 2,300 metres of rock, 20 minutes under a terrain of story and myth that has shaped the Swiss identity. But who will still notice it, travelling at high speed deep in the heart of the Alps?

swissinfo.ch decided to follow the traces of history and myth on foot, hiking the old Gotthard road. The journey begins in Erstfeld, canton Uri, where the north end of the new tunnel is now situated, and takes us to Pollegio, in Ticino, the other end of the tunnel, in five stages.

It is late June. The weather forecast is for a beautiful week ahead. There is no need for a coat, just a notebook, a microphone, a camera and any other tools needed to immortalise this epic trek through the Alps.

The history of Erstfeld is closely linked to the history of the Gotthard rail line. With the opening of the line in 1882, what had been a small rural village became an important railway centre. It is not by chance that Erstfeld is home to one of the three historic storage sites of the Swiss Federal Railways. Carl Waldis, a retired teacher and a tour guide “with a passion for rail”, walks us around the carriages and locomotives, such as the legendary Crocodile, which made railway history.

But before talking about railways, we need to go back a bit further in history. For centuries, the Gotthard was just one of many passes through the Alps; it certainly was not the most important one, as Ralph Aschwanden, a historian and journalist with the local newspaper points out. A lot more in the way of goods and people crossed by way of the Brenner or the Great St Bernard. Yet compared with other passes, the Gotthard has always had one advantage. “It is the shortest route from north to south. Lake Maggiore and Lake Lucerne are only 140 km apart. This is important, since in the Middle Ages most goods were transported by boat,” explains Aschwanden. What was the hard part? “It was always a difficult terrain to cross.” The road was punctuated by steep ravines, like the Schöllenen, that were impossible to negotiate before the early 13th century.

For the locals, however, it came to mean a livelihood. “Up to two-thirds of the inhabitants of canton Uri depended on the pack-horse business,” notes Carl Waldis.

At Silenen, 4 km from Erstfeld, we pause before the building which was once the first staging point for mule trains and travellers coming from Flüelen, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. “The journey to Bellinzona was organised by guilds of muleteers, each of which managed a particular route”, explains Waldis. According to a document from the early 1700s, up to 300 pack animals crossed per day.

The need to manage the pass – and the income from it – may well have been a factor in forging the first alliances between the core cantons of Switzerland at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. These alliances sowed the seeds of what later became the Swiss Confederation. So it is not surprising that, come the 19th century, this region and its legendary heroes like William Tell and Arnold Winkelried provided the foundation myths for the new nation.

We continue along the old packhorse trail. Just above Amsteg, on the hill of Flüeli, we get to another landmark that features in the myths, the ruins of the Zwing-Uri, a fortress built in the first half of the 13th century and (according to legend, not documented) destroyed during a revolt against the Hapsburgs. The hill is significant for yet another reason: during excavations archaeologists found remains of the Middle Bronze Age (around 1500 B.C.), which suggests the area was inhabited by man from very early on.

We stay close to the railway line. The valley now gets narrower and the road starts to get winding. The landscape is at times breathtaking – or would be were it not for the motorway, which makes the roaring Reuss look a bit less poetic than it might.

At Gurtnellen, a photograph of the floods in 1987 reminds us of how much this artery is at the mercy of nature. Even if you have crossed countless times by way of the modern road and rail, only on foot do you realise that railway and motorway are not just a matter of viaducts and tunnels. Everywhere you notice avalanche barriers, retaining walls, steel nets to catch rockslides, warning systems, railway huts and so on.

We resume our journey first thing in the morning. This Tuesday in late June, temperatures are almost tropical. As we leave Wassen behind, it is hard to imagine that two years before the opening of the rail line this village had 3,000 inhabitants, mostly railway construction workers. Today there are just 400.

The trail climbs the west side of the valley. We pass what was once the dwelling-house of a railway guard, far away from any other signs of civilisation. In the first decades of the operation, the rails and infrastructure had to be checked by the workmen every day, and they often lived with their families in these isolated locations. There was one of these cottages every three kilometres. The use of better steel and the coming of machinery to make measurements made on-the-spot inspections no longer necessary, and so these cottages were mostly abandoned.

After taking a wrong turn and having done what one should not do – walking along the rail lines –  to avoid a climb back, we arrive in Göschenen. In front of the entrance to the ‘old’ railway tunnel I think of the thousands of workers, most of them from the north of Italy, who worked here, and ponder the story told by Carl Waldis.

Officially, during the tunnel excavations 177 people died. The number of victims could be higher and actually reach 500, according to Waldis’s figures. For example, injured workers who died after returning home were not counted.

Whereas working conditions in the tunnel were very hard, outside it wasn’t much better. Workers were lumped together in tents and makeshift housing, with no water or hygienic facilities. Their only incentive was a salary slightly higher than in other such operations. A miner earned not much more than CHF100 a month from which were deducted the rent of an oil lamp (CHF5) and accommodation (CHF15-20 for a bed).

Aski resort that had seen better days, Andermatt got a much-needed boost in the past few years with the arrival of Egyptian businessman Samih Sawiris, who has invested hundreds of millions of francs in a new tourist development. On the plain leading to Hospental, which used to be a base of the Swiss army, a sign tells hikers to watch out for flying golf balls.

The inscription on the wall of the Hospental chapel dedicated to St Charles Borromeo sums up perfectly the history of this old crossroads of humanity: “Here the paths divide. Friend, where are your steps taking you? Are you going down to the Eternal City of Rome? Towards the German Rhine and hallowed Cologne? Or westwards into France?” For the purposes of this trip, we are going down in the direction of the Eternal City. Actually, we are going uphill and then down. Another ten kilometres and we will be at the top of the pass. The trail hugs the old highway, built in 1830, and the ancient mule-track.

“Before the railway opened in 1882, the pass was used all year round. To compact the snow they drove oxen through it, and the stage-coaches were replaced by sleighs,” explains Carlo Peterposten, head of the National Gotthard Museum, who joins us on the trail. The stage-coach took two days to get from Basel to Milan. With mules, from Fluelen to Milan it took about ten days.

A huge vent reminds us that a few hundred metres below, the motorway is going through the tunnel. “Road, rail, and that’s not all – above here is an international flight path, and a migratory flyway for the birds,” Peterposten tells us.

Having passed the San Carlo fort, which is a fortress converted into a hotel, we reach the sign that tells us “Gotthard pass, 2106 m”. Here we are! We have arrived at the highest point of the pass named after St Gotthard, a Benedictine bishop of Hildesheim who was canonised in 1131.

This is a geographical and cultural meeting point, as Peterposten tells us, and also a watershed, with four major rivers that rise nearby: the Rhine, the Rhone, the Reuss and the Ticino.

Due to its central position, the Gotthard massif was long considered the highest point in the Alps, until 1716, when the error was corrected.

The rays of the sun that begin to illuminate the little lakes and the mountains give one a sense of tranquillity. Yet this peaceful appearance is deceptive, for the weather can quickly turn into a nightmare. We are still in the Alps, as thousands of travellers over the centuries have found out to their cost. When St Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) visited the Gotthard, it seems he was so shocked by the sight of the skeletons of numerous travellers that he ordered their temporary inhumation in what is today the Chapel of the Dead, a little church built over a cleft in the rock, as Carlo Peterposten recounts.

But now we get to enter another kind of cleft, made by man. A few hundred metres from the peaceful hostel, we are faced with a gigantic armour-plated door. Damian Zingg, executive director of the Sasso San Gottardo Foundation, gives us a guided tour inside the Sasso da Pigna fort, built between 1941 and 1943 and an official secret until 2001, though thousands of vehicles pass a few metres from the entrance. If you look closely you can see the barrels of the big guns sticking out of the walls a hundred metres overhead.

The “National Redoubt”, the defence plan adopted by the Swiss army after the outbreak of World War II, focused on holding the Alpine area and the Gotthard in particular, became the symbol of the country’s will to defend itself and its liberty from the surrounding Axis powers.

It is because of the National Redoubt centred on the Gotthard that Switzerland is supposed to have avoided invasion. But this is a modern, founding myth of Switzerland, as the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland tells us. Doubt began to be cast on it in the 1990s, when historians started to put more emphasis on the network of economic, financial and political interests with the opposing alliances, relegating to second place the importance of the Redoubt.

This strategy of fortifying the Alps did not come to an end with the capitulation of Nazi Germany, but was continued during the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the Swiss army, many of the bunkers were dismantled. Some of them have been transformed into museums.

The traffic is flowing smoothly along the motorway. This is not to be taken for granted on this north-south corridor where on average 15,000 cars and 2,300 trucks cross daily. There is not exactly a permanent traffic jam, but it can look like it. As a result the Gotthard has become a battleground for environmentalists seeking to reduce through-traffic in the Alpine regions.

Today is the last stage of our journey. To get from Airolo to Pollegio, as planned, we switch from hiking boots to the bicycle.

After a while travelling on level ground, we reach the Dazio Grande in Rodi, one of the most symbolic buildings along the Gotthard. The imposing structure is in a highly strategic position about a hundred metres from the Piottino gorge, an obligatory stretch for anyone going this way.

As we found with the Schöllenen gorge, the men of Uri (who ruled the Leventina till 1798) were not ones to shy away from natural obstacles. Why go around this gorge in the Leventina, taking a much longer route, if a road could be built? So they got to work, and in 1561 it was ready. The road provided a good return on investment. In one of the magnificently restored rooms of this old custom house, there is a list of toll fees on display. “Owners of bears crossing here had to pay 37.5 lire, the same as a carriage traveller,” says the Dazio manager Mariapia Conconi.

Practically invisible to anyone crossing by car or train, the stretch along the ancient road through the gorges is a terrific sight. At one point, we see where a landslide has carried away the whole road. When nature lets loose and water flows down these sheer walls, the sight must be impressive.