Gotthard Pass
Gotthardpass
Interesting facts
- Capuchin friars ran the summit hospice from 1685 to 1841 and were granted special permission to wear shoes because of the bitter cold.
- Goethe climbed to the top of the pass three times but never actually crossed over to the Italian side.
- In the early 15th century around 10,000 travellers and 9,000 pack mules crossed the pass each year.
- In winter, ox-drawn sledges hauled loads of about 600 kilograms over the snow, roughly four times what a mule carried in summer.
- The Romans knew the pass as Adula Mons but rarely used it, because the Schöllenen Gorge below blocked the way north.
- A regular Gotthard Post coach service began in 1830, and from 1842 daily five-horse, ten-seat coaches ran over the pass.
- In 1857 more than 29,000 passengers crossed by post coach, and the journey from Como to Flüelen took just under 23 hours.
- Rudolf Koller's 1874 painting The Gotthard Post, showing a coach racing downhill past startled cattle, became an icon of Swiss art.
- The summit is a watershed: water flowing north joins the Rhine bound for the North Sea, while southward streams feed the Ticino and the Po.
- Russian field marshal Alexander Suvorov led his army over the pass in 1799, a crossing later celebrated in a painting by Alexander von Kotzebue.
Why it is worth it
The Gotthard Pass crosses the heart of the Swiss Alps at 2,106 metres, linking the German-speaking canton of Uri with Italian-speaking Ticino. At the top lies a stark, rocky saddle scattered with small lakes, the largest of them Lago della Piazza, with the old hospice beside it. For eight centuries this has been one of the great crossings of Europe — the most direct route between the Rhine and the plains of Lombardy, and a pass whose control helped shape Switzerland itself.
Though known locally since antiquity, the route only came into general use in the early 13th century, when a first wooden bridge, built around 1220, finally carried travellers across the torrent of the Reuss in the narrow Schöllenen Gorge below Andermatt. A chapel dedicated to Saint Gotthard of Hildesheim, patron of mountain travellers, was consecrated by the Archbishop of Milan in 1230, and the pass soon took the saint's name. Guaranteeing safe passage along the road from Zürich to the Gotthard became one of the founding interests of the early Swiss Confederacy, whose expansion south towards Milan eventually brought Ticino into Swiss hands. In 1707–08 the Urnerloch, the first road tunnel in the Alps, was cut through the rock at Schöllenen; the Battle of Gotthard Pass was fought here on 24 September 1799.
On the southern side, the old road descends into the Val Tremola in a cascade of 24 hairpin bends. Designed by the engineer Francesco Meschini and built between 1827 and 1832, the Tremola keeps much of its granite paving and dry-stone retaining walls, and is listed as the longest road monument in Switzerland. Beneath the pass, three tunnels each set a world record for length when completed: the Gotthard Rail Tunnel (1882), the Gotthard Road Tunnel (1980) and the 57-kilometre Gotthard Base Tunnel (2016), the longest and deepest railway tunnel in the world.
Getting there
The pass lies about 5 km north of Airolo in Ticino, a station on the Gotthard railway line, and the main road over the summit connects Airolo with Hospental and Andermatt in Uri. The larger town of Locarno is about 47 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Lugano Airport (LUG), about 67 km away; Zürich Airport (ZRH) is about 100 km to the north.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Furka Pass 11.2 km · mountain-pass
- Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway 15.3 km · heritage-railway
- Verzasca 23.3 km · river
- Gelmerbahn 20.3 km · funicular
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Gotthard Pass or St. Gotthard Pass at 2,106 m (6,909 ft) is a mountain pass in the Alps traversing the Saint-Gotthard Massif and connecting northern Switzerland with southern Switzerland. The pass lies between Airolo in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, and Andermatt in the German-speaking canton of Uri, and connects further Bellinzona and Lugano to Lucerne, Basel, and Zürich. The Gotthard Pass lies at the heart of the Gotthard, a major transport axis of Europe, and it is crossed by three traffic tunnels, each being the world's longest at the time of their construction: the Gotthard Rail Tunnel (1882), the Gotthard Road Tunnel (1980) and the Gotthard Base Tunnel (2016). With the Lötschberg to the west, the Gotthard is one of the two main north-south routes through the Swiss Alps.
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