Gornergrat — scenic viewpoint
Image by klausdie from Pixabay

Gornergrat

  • Elevation3,135 m
  • 1 min read
  • 45.983° N 7.785° E

Interesting facts

  • The Gornergrat Railway was Europe's highest railway until the Jungfrau Railway reached higher in 1912; it is still the continent's second highest.
  • It is one of only four railways in the world running on three-phase electric power, with the rails serving as the third conductor.
  • Construction began in 1896, five years after the line from Visp first linked Zermatt with the Rhône valley.
  • For its first decades the railway ran only in summer; year-round service reached the summit in 1941.
  • The line uses the Abt rack system along its full 9.3 km and can carry about 2,500 passengers an hour up the mountain.
  • From 1958 to 2007 a cable car ran from Gornergrat over the Hohtälli to the Stockhorn at 3,405 m, once Zermatt's highest lift station.
  • The ridge lies between two glaciers, the Gorner and the Findel; the Gorner Glacier is often billed as the second longest in the Alps.
  • The hotel's north tower housed the Gornergrat Infrared Telescope until 2005, and the south tower the KOSMA submillimetre telescope until 2010.
  • The Riffelhorn, a 2,928-metre rock peak beside Rotenboden station, rises on the western side of the ridge.

Why it is worth it

Gornergrat is a rocky ridge above Zermatt, and from its crest at 3,135 metres it offers one of the great high-mountain panoramas of the Alps. The Matterhorn stands to the west in its most familiar profile, while to the east and south a wall of snow peaks crowds the horizon — Monte Rosa with the Dufourspitze, Switzerland's highest summit. Nearly thirty summits above 4,000 metres are in view. Directly below, the Gorner Glacier curves round the foot of the Monte Rosa massif, a broad, crevassed river of ice fed by tributaries from every side.

What makes the viewpoint unusual is how it is reached. The Gornergrat Railway opened on 20 August 1898 and was the first electric rack railway built in Switzerland; it still runs on an unusual three-phase system with two overhead wires. On its 9.3-kilometre journey from Zermatt the metre-gauge line climbs almost 1,500 metres, past Riffelalp, Riffelberg and Rotenboden, to a terminus at about 3,089 metres — the highest open-air railway in Europe.

On the summit ridge stands the Kulmhotel Gornergrat, a mountain hotel whose towers carry astronomical observatory domes, installed in the late 1960s; one now houses the Stellarium Gornergrat, with a 600-millimetre telescope used for research and public astronomy. The combination — a nineteenth-century railway, a hotel with telescopes and a ring of glaciated four-thousanders — gives Gornergrat an atmosphere quite different from a simple lookout.

Getting there

Gornergrat is reached by the Gornergrat Railway from its station in Zermatt, in the canton of Valais. The nearest larger town in the Rhône valley is Sierre, about 39 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Turin Airport (TRN), about 88 km away across the Alps; within Switzerland, Bern Airport (BRN) is about 106 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Valais 7The Most Beautiful Places in Switzerland 44The Most Spectacular Viewpoints 33The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Gornergrat is a rocky ridge of the Pennine Alps, overlooking the Gorner Glacier south-east of Zermatt in Switzerland. It can be reached from Zermatt by the Gornergrat rack railway (GGB), the highest open-air railway in Europe. Between the Gornergrat railway station and the summit is the Kulm Hotel. In the late 1960s two astronomical observatories were installed in the two towers of the Kulmhotel Gornergrat. The project “Stellarium Gornergrat” is hosted in the Gornergrat South Observatory.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

45.98338, 7.78500per Wikidata