Andermatt • Walking in Switzerland - Beautiful Village 🇨🇭【4K】

Andermatt is a mountain village and municipality in the canton of Uri in Switzerland. At an altitude of 1437 meters above sea level, Andermatt is located at the center of the Saint-Gotthard Massif and the historical center cross of north-south and east-west traverses of Switzerland. It is some 28 km south of Altdorf, the capital of Uri.

Archaeological finds dating back to 4000 BC indicate that the Ursern was populated already in the Neolithic period. During Roman times this Alpine valley was probably inhabited by some Helvetic Celtic tribes. However, the origins of Andermatt can only be traced back to Alemannic tribes, the Walsers, who established settlements in the area, where the current town of Andermatt is situated.

The parish of Andermatt was not mentioned until the year of 1203 AD, serving as a tenure to the Benedictine Disentis Abbey. This first mention refers to it as de Prato. In 1290 it was mentioned as A der Matte.[6] In 1649, with the emergence of an independent Swiss Confederation, the ecclesiastical rights of the Monastery Disentis were revoked in favour of civil legislation.

In the Flight of the Earls, Irish earls lost a fortune of gold down at the Devil's Bridge crossing ravine on St Patrick's Day in 1608. It has never been recovered and is known as the Lost Treasure of the St Gotthard Pass.[7]

Nearby Schöllenen Gorge is the site of a memorial commemorating the 1799 campaign of the Russian general Alexander Suvorov.

Between 1818-1831 the nearby St Gotthard Pass was made accessible to stagecoaches. As the last resort before the pass, Andermatt flourished economically and became a popular spa town.

The opening, in 1881, of the St Gotthard railway tunnel, however, reverted its fortunes as the tunnel runs immediately beneath the town, connecting the Central Swiss town Göschenen with Airolo in Ticino. Some Andermattians, who worked on the tunnel were killed during its construction. A strike by the tunnel workers, furthermore, was put down through the use of military force killing a further four workers.

Since 1885 AD Andermatt has been converted into a garrison town of the Swiss Federal Army. Here the infrastructure for the High Command of the Swiss Federal Army in an event of war was built. Today it is location of a Training Centre of the Swiss army.

Plans to build a series of reservoirs in the valley of Andermatt, the Ursern, were voted down by the locals and a huge reservoir was built instead in the next valley called the Göschenertal.[citation needed]

Several avalanches, in particular in the winter of 1951 and 1975 have caused havoc in some residential areas of Andermatt killing the inhabitants of the houses affected.[citation needed]

By the 1930s the town's income from tourism had seriously declined, and many of the Ursental's hotels were abandoned or changed usage. The Grand Hotel Bellevue, which was built by the aristocratic Müller family from neighbouring Hospental (who at one time or another owned many other hotels nearby including the Hotel Furkablick and Hotel Furka Passhöhe - as well as hotels in Flüelen, Alpnachstad, Herisau and Neuchâtel) was converted in the 1970s into apartments, but by 1990 had been abandoned and was demolished with explosives. By the turn of the 21st century, as an alternative to the expensive skiing resorts in the Grisons (Graubünden) at St Moritz and Gstaad, Andermatt's fortunes again revived and the town has seen considerable expansion and is currently undergoing much speculative building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andermatt

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