The genius barns that fed the Alps

“I look at the stadels and I think, ‘How romantic, and [what] a hard life’,” said Zermatt-born Linda Biner. Her nonagenarian father, Thomas Biner, nodded knowingly from his rocking chair, telling me, “There was no rice in Switzerland back then.”

At just 14 years old, he recalled hiking over Zermatt’s 3,300m-high Theodul Pass to Italy’s Aosta Valley to trade tobacco for the prized grain. “My [widowed] mother had six children, four cows, three goats and not a penny,” he continued. Far from being shackled to the stove, women toiled the land too, even braving avalanche paths to tend to their livestock.

From the age of eight, Thomas learned to milk cows on Zermatt’s high pastures. Summers were spent sleeping on a bed of straw (used as winter fodder for the animals) in the upper part of the family’s two-storey stable, known as a gädi. This simple yet ingenious construction kept him warm by harnessing heat from the cattle below.

Moving in sync with the seasons wasn’t just a way of life, but a means of survival. It goes to explain the strategic placement of these traditional gädis and stadels, which tumble down from the steep slopes to the undulating meadows below. Zermatt (which translates as “by or on the meadow”) was originally a handful of hamlets scattered over some 60,000 acres.

The Biner family owned 10 barns just for stockpiling rye. Nicknamed “the sleeping grain” by Alpine farmers, it would hibernate under the first flush of snow after being sown in September, and was hand-cut the following August to be hoarded for the long winter ahead. Pest and damp-proofing the precious cereal was another matter. Farmers’ canny solution was to elevate their granaries several feet above the ground on mushroom-like stilts topped with huge circular slabs of locally sourced schist rock. The barns’ rose-hued, resin-rich timber was felled from local larch that’s particularly resistant to rye-loving rodents, that are repelled by its strong scent.

The distinctive silhouette of these age-old grain barns even inspired the logo for Zermatt’s 3.7km-long Culture Trail. Inaugurated in 2019, the trail steadily climbs 300m from the town centre to Zmutt, one of the Alps’ earliest-built hamlets.

“I was thinking one day, where are the oldest buildings [in the valley]?” president of Zermatt’s Cultural and Historical Society, René Biner (unrelated to Thomas and Linda), told me, as we walked along the trail that snakes past a 700-year-old-barn, only recently dated thanks to dendrochronology. “Owners have neglected the stadels in the last 30 to 40 years,” he added, explaining that many no longer serve a practical use since very little rye is now harvested, and are therefore abandoned.

This, combined with the fact that there is no financial incentive to restore them – since local law prohibits the conversion of agricultural buildings into residential dwellings – makes their ongoing maintenance a challenge.

With the exception of gädis (a handful of which provide refuge for the Valais’ famously friendly, curly fringed Blacknose sheep during Zermatt’s bitter winters), the majority of these barn-like structures lie abandoned. René is on a mission to remedy this. When we reached Zmutt, he revealed the bundles of freshly harvested rye sheafs stored in a friend’s stadel that he plans to use to make traditional roggenbrot (rye bread). His forefathers would have collected their flour from Zermatt’s only mill, before baking loaves in communal ovens shared by up to 20 people.

As recently as the 1940s, grain was grown at 2,000m in Zmutt, where stones demarcating locals’ land are still visible. A single family would have typically owned several dozen small parcels, dispersed to prevent a rockfall or avalanche from decimating their entire harvest. However, “When the train was built [in 1891] it was cheaper to buy the cereal from down the valley,” René said. The steady decline in farming continued as Alpine tourism took off in the 20th Century, with World War Two finally snuffing out Zermatt’s agrarian way of life.

For local hotelier and restauranteur Sandrine Julen – a descendant of one of Zermatt’s founding families – the stadels connect her with her heritage. “As a child, I remember walking through the stadels with my grandfather, him telling me the stories of his upbringing. They form a part of our history, and it’s a constant reminder that we shall not forget where we came from,” she told me.

In the wine-growing village of Visperterminen (the gateway to the Valais’ Visper Valley), a clutch of dilapidated grain barns is being repurposed for social good. It’s part of a decade-old non-profit called Chinderwält, founded by retired professor Julian Vomsattel. “All these old barns were unused, so I asked, what can we do to preserve them?” the local told me.

With the help of several artists and architects, he has transformed them into five themed indoor playgrounds, and for a nominal fee of CHF10 (£9), children can spend three hours flitting between them. We shuffled along the original threshing corridor where farmers once flailed the rye, bisecting a “space-themed” stadel annexed to another grain barn packed to its 17th-Century rafters with vintage paraphernalia, like a windwanna. Used to separate the chaff from the grain kernels long ago, the instrument has since been upcycled into a flying dragon. “The project’s important for the life of the village,” Vomsattel said.

“It’s also helping to show the old way of life,” added Visperterminen-born interior architect Judith Kreuzer, who’s in the throes of renovating the project’s sixth barn.

Vomsattel counts himself among the eight-out-of-10 villagers who air-dry their meat as their ancestors did in speichers (storerooms). These seasonal fridges of yesteryear were also balanced on stilted stones, to prevent ground moisture from spoiling the meat. But air-circulating gaps between the floor panels differentiates them from their grain-caching cousins. Wind whistled through the cracks as Vomsattel pulled out a giant skeleton key to his family’s sixth-generation speicher. Hung from the ceiling joists were butcher-style hooks where Vomsattel’s hunter brother dry-cures game like roe deer and chamois (a goat-like antelope), from October.

Seventy-five kilometres away in the French-speaking valley of Val d’Hérens, six ancient grain barns (referred to locally as raccards) were spared demolition thanks to Swiss architect Olivier Cheseaux. He eyed them a decade ago while paragliding over the village of Evolène. “Our ancestors built perfectly in harmony with nature, cutting wood in the right season,” he said.

Virtually unchanged from the outside, inside, the self-catering “huts” have been contemporised in Cheseaux’s signature pared-back style, with smoothed concrete floors and spruce wood walls. “I quickly realised that the laws did not allow me to transform the buildings because they were in an agricultural zone. So, I decided to save heritage from ruin by using the philosophy of our ancestors, that is, by moving them [to the pocket-sized village of La Forclaz, which is outside the agricultural zone]” he told me. During the Little Ice Age (from the 14th to 19th Centuries), Swiss farmers frequently dismantled their barns and re-erected them away from advancing glaciers.

Few have travelled the distance that Nikola Kapp’s 150-year-old stilted barn has. Nestled in the back garden of the former banker’s Zermatt home is a 4.5mx5m gädi transplanted from the village of Eisten in the neighbouring Saas Valley. “We had to fly everything in on a helicopter,” she told me, pointing out the original wooden crucifix still affixed to the larch facade. “We numbered each piece of wood and even used some of the authentic nails,” she explained of the painstaking four-month-long restoration project undertaken in 2008. A labour of love, its Heidi-esque interior has made two-storied Kalu Gädi an instant hit on Airbnb. “My heart opens when I see the Matterhorn,” Kapp said of the gingham curtain-framed view of the snaggle-toothed peak.

My own gaze was drawn to the sunburnt, stilted barns in the foreground. Though dwarfed by the snow-capped mountain, they still stand defiant centuries later, and hopefully for several more centuries to come.

Heritage Architecture is a BBC Travel series that explores the world’s most interesting and unusual buildings that define a place through aesthetic beauty and inventive ways of adapting to local environments.

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