The Walserweg Gottardo: A new trail tells the story of Switzerland’s forgotten people

Crossing the High Alps through Switzerland and Italy, this 210km hiking route unravels some of the region’s most intriguing human history.

As I stopped to rest, the deep tolling of cow bells echoed across Alpine meadows bright with the blooms of wildflowers. I took in a lungful of fresh mountain air, half-wondering how on earth the Walser people managed to walk this same steep trail with their livestock and worldly possessions, and pushed further along the ancient mule track that led up and out of the Binna Valley beyond the tiny hamlet of Fald.

I was in Switzerland to tackle the first stages of the newly inaugurated 210km Walserweg Gottardo long-distance hiking trail, which officially opened in May 2024. While the natural beauty of the trail is enough to attract hikers from across the world, the route has a deeper purpose. It seeks to unravel some of the region’s most intriguing human history: the little-known story of the Walser, who migrated through the Alps from Valais to Grisons for still unknown reasons during the 12th to the 14th Centuries.

Predominantly shepherds, cattle breeders and subsistence farmers, the Walser have long been an under-appreciated part of Swiss culture. They are indigenous to the Canton of Valais in south-western Switzerland, but now mostly live at altitudes just below the High Alps, so-named because their extreme height makes permanent human habitation impossible.

The High Alps have traditionally not been celebrated but feared. The Romans, known for their military might and impressive engineering feats, called the area terra maledicta or “cursed earth”. Nevertheless, the zone immediately below the High Alps is exactly where the Walser migrated, founding small settlements further and further east on multiple occasions over many generations.

What makes the Walser’s ancient decision to migrate eastward so interesting is that the reasons behind their migrations, or Walserwanderungen, remain uncertain, even to the Walser themselves. Both overpopulation of the Upper Valais and forced migration by feudal landlords have been suggested.

“When I was in primary school [in the 1960s], they told us it was because the people had been hungry and went somewhere else where nobody lived so they were able to stay there,” Andreas Weissen, a local guidebook author told me. “Historians now say it was a programme of settlement [of previously uninhabited land].”

Today there are a few thousand Walser, inhabiting around 150 individual villages mostly situated along the new trail’s route and maintaining a distinct culture and language. They speak a dialect of German largely unintelligible to Standard German speakers and live in small communities of traditional vernacular wooden “Walserhaus” homes in the remote mountains. Sometimes called “colonies”, these settlements reach all the way to Grisons, Switzerland’s easternmost canton, and as far north as Lichtenstein.

Despite their geographic spread, the Walser are aware their smallholder culture, developed through necessity due to their historic isolation, is at risk of disappearing. Many of their characteristics and traditions are intangible in nature. The Walser can’t be distinguished by their citizenship, dress, physical appearance or religious faith, meaning traditions are lost when Walser move from the Alps in search of employment or marry into non-Walser families.

“It’s just the strength to be who we are, to be different, to fight against the weather, the cold, and even be happy about it,” said Karin Tomamichel of the Walserhaus Museum, when I asked her what defines them as a people.

The new trail, created with the full support of Walser communities, is a way of keeping the culture alive by sharing their story with a wider number of people, even as Walser populations in settlements decline.

The route starts in Valais and follows their historic migration route, linking a variety of sights and locations that help reveal the Walser’s history and culture, including villages, restaurants/bistros serving up hearty Walser cuisine and the Walserhaus Museum in the town of Bosco Gurin.

I’d decided to tackle the trail’s first five stages, which saw me cover 67km of the trail, from the Walser’s ancestral home of the village of Binn in Valais, where some Walser still live amid narrow, car-free paths that lead between chalet-style blockbau homes, recognisable by stacks of horizontal logs interconnected at the corners atop a stone cellar.

Today, Valais is known for its French-speaking majority, and while there are few physical reminders of the Walser in the canton, the historical connections can be seen in other ways. For instance, “Walser” is a contraction of the word “Walliser”, meaning “inhabitant of Valais” in the Walser German dialect of Walsertitsch, hinting at more complex linguistic and cultural origins in the canton.

From Binn, the trail makes use of the lowest pass through the mountains, the desolate 2,409m-high Albrunpass. To reach it, just as the Walser did centuries ago, I climbed steadily on ancient here-and-gone-again tracks and through pasture studded with hidden marmot burrows into larch forest spongy underfoot from endless seasons of fallen needles.