HERE'S LOOKING @ YOU, CH-3920

IF IT'S BEEN A FEW YEARS since you visited CH-3920 Zermatt, be prepared for a small city, not a village, with 100+ hotels, tens of thousands of visitors, endless construction, and disappearing greenery within the town. Today being a special one, we planned to lunch at the Schoenegg, or "Beautiful Corner" hotel, where we could see how the town is changing.

Luncheon was simple but memorable: First, some good Swiss white Fendant. Then on to a delicious soup: on one side of the table, Andalusian gazpacho, crisply cold and served with a side of violet-adorned sundried tomato/olive tapenade on crackers; and on the other, creamy morel mushroom soup-of-the-day, just singing with forest flavor. (Why must we settle for dried porcinis at home; morels do grow in New England!) To follow up, there were two types of steak tartare: the original, brimming with onion, Worcestershire sauce and tomato paste; and the Asian, zesty with fresh ginger, sesame and green onion. In keeping with today's passion for vertical food, the tartares were each planted with a sprig of parsley and another violet!

Looking out at Zermatt through the new glass railing, you can see the base of the cloud-wrapped Matterhorn, the new copper roof of the Zermatterhof Hotel (to the right of the tall tree just above the wine bucket), the Monte Rosa Hotel across the street and the Mt. Cervin a couple of buildings to the right (look from the menu card up past a green swath of grass to the building whose top floor is all dormer windows). Note the Vispa River, in its concrete banks, bounding through the center of town (just to the right of the menu card.) And notice the "hotel creep" on the side of the far hill.

A few more shots show the river continuing its way through town and down the valley. The turquoise horizontal swath in the center is ALL that is left of the original town center -- just a few tennis courts/ice hockey rinks surrounded by luxurious apartments and shops. And the plywood rooftops at right are the main shopping complex opposite the Bahnhof (across from the Gornergrat Bahn terminus, which is the large, flat roof on the cream-colored building in the vertical picture).

The construction you see immediately below the Schoenegg porch is 7 Heavens, a new luxury condo development we'll cover in another post. Can you see the river wending its way? Happily, the steep hillside across the river is too avalanche-prone for building (and has no Matterhorn view). But it's good for some other things, which will also be the subject of an upcoming post.

Looking across the lower town, you can see the Bahnhof with two red Glacier Express trains waiting on a siding for their trip across the Alps -- ultimately to St. Moritz. The lower part of Zermatt, once sparsely built, is filling in as well. (The panorama concludes with the beautiful Schoenegg balconies at the right.)