Almost every tourist who sets foot in Switzerland will visit the Valais, and many will go nowhere else, simply because every piece of the quintessentially ‘Swiss’ experience is here for the taking: The skiing, the cheese, the cows; the Matterhorn, the hiking, the chocolate. In south-west Switzerland, the Valais is one of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, and Zermatt and Verbier are two of its best-known towns: Verbier for its sumptuous skiing, Zermatt for the Toblerone itself – the Matterhorn. Both sit atop lush alpine valleys that feed north to the Rhône, which flows through Lake Geneva and then France, into the Mediterranean Sea.
The Valais boasts 40 of Switzerland’s 52 summits above 4,000 metres, and 38 of those tower above Zermatt, a village whose population of 6,000 swells to over 40,000…
