Andermatt reborn – how a Gotthard garrison town became a five-star resort

For centuries Andermatt was a crossroads, then an army town whose hotels emptied. Since 2005 an Egyptian developer has given it a five-star hotel, a concert hall with windows onto the mountains and a ski area that now runs all the way to Disentis.

Andermatt sits at 1,437 metres in the Urseren valley in the canton of Uri, at the centre of the St Gotthard massif. Three passes leave the valley – the Oberalp to the east, the Gotthard to the south and the Furka to the west – and to the north the Reuss drops through the Schöllenen gorge, crossed by the Devil's Bridge. Since the Schöllenen route opened around 1200, the village has stood on the main road through the Alps. For more mountain towns, see our Alps destinations.

Boom, bust and the army

When the Gotthard Pass was made passable for stagecoaches in 1818–31, Andermatt became the last stop before the climb and flourished as a spa town. The railway tunnel of 1881, running directly beneath the village, ended that. From 1885 Andermatt was a garrison town of the Swiss Army, and by the 1930s its tourist trade had fallen away; the Grand Hotel Bellevue was turned into flats and finally demolished. The memorial in the Schöllenen to the Russian general Alexander Suvorov, commemorating his campaign of 1799, recalls an older military past.

The Sawiris plan

The turning point came after the army scaled back. In 2005 the Egyptian entrepreneur Samih Sawiris was invited to Andermatt as an adviser; seeing the valley, he decided to propose a project of his own. In March 2007 the villagers approved it with 96 per cent in favour, the army sold most of its land, and the federal government exempted the new quarter, Andermatt Reuss, from the Lex Koller restrictions on foreign buyers. By the end of 2022 Andermatt Swiss Alps had invested around CHF 1.4 billion, and that year it turned its first profit.

The Chedi and the concert hall

The flagship is The Chedi Andermatt, a five-star deluxe hotel begun in 2009 and opened in December 2013. It has collected numerous awards, among them Gault&Millau's Hotel of the Year 2017. A Radisson Blu, the Reussen, followed in 2018 with a public indoor pool, and the development includes an 18-hole golf course.

The most surprising addition opened in June 2019: the Andermatt Konzerthalle, designed by the London-based architect Christina Seilern and funded by Sawiris. It was the first concert hall in the Alps with windows to the outside, and on its opening night Constantinos Carydis conducted the Berlin Philharmonic. Since 2022 its programme has been run by the intendant Lena-Lisa Wüstendörfer.

Skiing from Andermatt to Disentis

Andermatt has two ski mountains: the Gemsstock to the south and Nätschen to the north-east, which can also be reached by train. In December 2018 two gondolas and three chairlifts linked the village to the Oberalp Pass, and in April 2019 the Cuolm da Vi gondola closed the last gap to Disentis. Andermatt, Sedrun and Disentis now form a single ski area, and the Glacier Express stops in the village. The Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn connects Andermatt with Brig and Visp, and the short Schöllenenbahn runs down to Göschenen on the Gotthard line.

For more travel reading, browse Metro Mode Travel and our destination guides. Andermatt's foreign-buyer exemption is rare in Switzerland; for buyers looking at the French Alps, VERA PI tracks prices in Val d'Isère and other resorts.

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