Andermatt’s billionaire invasion
Tors Arnold explores the Swiss military town of Andermatt, whose deep, deserted powder fields are about to be over-run by a tourist apocalypse.
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I was digging myself out of bottomless powder when gunfire erupted in the little town below. From my deserted slope I stopped and listened, and smiled. The rat-a-tat-tat of bullets is music to the ears of any snowboarder here. It's the soundtrack to cheap living. Once the ammo dries up, the mountain will change: tourism will seize control, and prices will rocket.
The Swiss Federal Army has been stationed in the mountain town of Andermatt for over 120 years, but now it's selling its land. The buyer is Samih Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire, who plans to develop the town into a luxury resort for the super-wealthy. Although currently an army training centre, Andermatt was once the lynchpin of Switzerland's defence strategy. In the event of an invasion, the military and government were to take refuge within a network of bunkers and barracks cut beneath its mountains. Andermatt's role was downsized after the Cold War but the army's presence had remained a key source of jobs for its locals.
Sawiris undertook his first reconnaissance of Andermatt in spring 2005, flying over the area by chopper. He liked what he saw. Andermatt is a compact, authentic town with a population of just 1300 people. Tucked beneath towering mountains on the St. Gotthard Pass it lays claim to the heftiest snowfall in Europe, with an annual average of 13m.
The minimalist resort is spread over three mountains but the action is focused on the highest, Gemsstock. Its top section is a glacial bowl jammed with steeps, big banked walls, powder fields and the occasional unmarked crevasse. There are only two pistes and the whole terrain is served by one cable car. Behind Gemsstock lies Andermatt's other draw: a giant sweep of backcountry riddled with powder opportunities.
Unlike the stereotypical Swiss resort, Andermatt is more grit than glitz. There are no parades of fur-ruffed jackets and buttock-clenching pants, no luxury hotels, no sleigh rides and scarcely any nightlife at all. Once you escape the cable car's tangle of jawed helmets, ABS packs (an airbag device that you inflate if caught in an avalanche), shovel handles, fat snowboards and powder skis, you realise there are barely any people either.
Isolation and exposure can snatch you easily on Gemsstock. In a mindless moment during a snowstorm I wound up vastly alone and robbed of any bearings - until a jagged lip of cliff suddenly opened out, right beneath my feet. Far below, a Swede lay crumpled and dazed, two orange balloons cushioned beneath him where his ABS pack had deployed in flight. A patroller finally turned up with the blood wagon, lit a cigarette and scowled.
Sawiris first met the Andermatt locals at the end of 2005 and ratcheted up the charm offensive by pitching his visions in flawless German. He told them the development would double the current 800 beds on offer and create 1000 jobs. He told them there'd be a golf course in summer, he even assured them their cows could graze on the links. The town gave him a standing ovation. But by 2006 Sawiris was asking for more than military acreage: he wanted local farmland too. The golf course would now be a world-class affair; there would be 6-star hotels, 400 apartments, 40 private villas and a swimming hall encased within a glass dome, rimmed by a heated beach.
Sawiris's company, Orascom Hotels and Development (OHD), label themselves as a 'destination developer'. Their flagship project, El Gouna in Egypt, began as a strip of beach but has since mushroomed into a full-blown town of 10,000 multinational residents. Andermatt's untapped potential fits the OHD strategy perfectly. Despite its remote feel, the town sits on a central crossroad within the Swiss Alps just 80km south of Zurich, and is a rail-stop on the Glacier Express between Zermatt and St. Moritz. With all this, it's a mystery how the resort has remained sunk in obscurity for so long. One Andermatt resident called Dan Loutrel offered me a theory: "They're touristically retarded here."
Dan is an unusual thing in Andermatt: an outsider. Originally from Boston, US, he arrived in 2004, married a local girl and now hand-builds his cult Birdos freeride skis in the town. Andermatt’s failure to act independently frustrates him. "It's not like they have to sell out – just maybe sell," he said. "They don't see touristic potential here. They just think, 'Oh no, what are we gonna do, the military's leaving! What can we do?'"
I asked Dan what the town thought of Sawiris' project. "They love it, totally love it!" he laughed, explaining that while two farmers had protested, "a lot of them just sold all their cows – like: 'These cows are a pain in the arse!' sort of thing."
While Dan recognised some benefits of the expansion for himself he claimed that, in his heart, he hated the idea. Of the other local businesses I spoke to, only my elderly, Andermatt-born landlady puffed her cheeks at mention of the development and snorted it was "too much". Everyone else politely insisted they were happy and excited, and I tried hard to believe them.
On our first trip to Andermatt in 2004, my riding buddy and I had a moment of panic thinking we'd arrived in the wrong town. We were the only ones in gear: everybody else was buying bread, dragging kids to kindergarten on sledges and doing a good job of stonewalling us. We spent the day hogging powder with an alpine-combat unit, loving the anti-tourist vibe. Dan told me that in his first season the locals didn't much like him. "It'd been a really small town and the locals did whatever they wanted," he said. "Nobody ever came and did anything different. We were like the first invasion!"
The day I left dawned blue and clear with deep, untracked snow filling the mountains and empty streets. I was on the early train down to Goschenen with some soldiers for company. They were probably never coming back. I was hoping there could still be a next time for me though - another powder drill, another orientation exercise, a last stand on Gemsstock.
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Andermatt’s billionaire invasion (text) by Tors Arnold is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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It's also disturbing this trend to try and making super-rich ghettos. Instead of sharing what's on offer with other people, this guy is creating an environment where only millionaries can afford to go - further cutting themselves off from everyday social interaction with 'lesser' people.
You guys are a bunch of whiny, bourgeois brats whose panties are in a wad because you have to share your precious powder with other, better-funded, brats. If you really cared about the unique character of the town, you'd keep your foreign asses out in the first place.