Valais

The Rhône valley

Valais is Switzerland’s third-largest canton by area, and nearly all of it drains into a single river: the Rhône, which rises at the Rhône Glacier on the canton’s eastern edge and runs the length of the canton before reaching Lake Geneva. The valley floor is French-speaking in its lower, western half and German-speaking, as Wallis, in its upper, eastern half, a split that falls between Sierre and Salgesch. Sion, the cantonal capital, sits on the valley floor at around 500m and is the canton’s largest town.

The highest ground in the country

Above the valley on both sides, side valleys climb toward the main Alpine watershed, and this is where Valais holds its two headline facts. Dufourspitze, in the Monte Rosa massif above Zermatt, is Switzerland’s highest point at 4,634m and the second-highest in the Alps after Mont Blanc, and the Valais Alps hold 41 of Switzerland’s 48 four-thousand-metre peaks, including the Matterhorn (4,478m). Zermatt, reached by rail up the Mattertal from Visp, has no cars, with drivers leaving them at Täsch for the shuttle train and only small electric vehicles operating in the village, and sits directly beneath the Matterhorn. Saas-Fee, in the Saastal, sits in a valley that Valais Tourism says is surrounded by 13 peaks over 4,000m, a count the resort’s own site raises to eighteen. Further along the Rhône, the Aletsch Glacier, the largest glacier in the Alps at about 23km long, flows down from the same watershed and is protected within the Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage Site, shared with the Bernese Oberland on the far side of the ridge.

Walking

Verbier and Crans-Montana, both around 1,500m, are ski resorts with summer trail networks of their own: Verbier’s tourist office counts over 500km of marked trails across Verbier, the Val de Bagnes and La Tzoumaz, and Crans-Montana’s gives 320km of signposted paths, from relaxing walks to more demanding excursions. Zermatt (1,608m) and Saas-Fee (1,800m) sit higher, and from Zermatt cable cars carry hikers in summer as far as the Klein Matterhorn at 3,883m. To the west, overlooking the Val d’Illiez and the Rhône valley, the Dents du Midi, a ridge of seven summits topping out at 3,257m in the Chablais Alps, are visible from Montreux and from the whole of the Rhône plain of the Chablais vaudois.

Season and access

The central Rhône valley in Valais is one of the driest regions of Switzerland, shut off from the Swiss Plateau by the Bernese Alps to the north and from the Po plains by the Valais Alps to the south. Access is by the Simplon line along the valley floor from Lausanne, or via the Lötschberg line from Spiez, with branch lines such as the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn from Visp to Zermatt climbing to the resorts.