Finding the 'Bonjour Boundary' in Switzerland's Secluded Canton of Valais

Through the Hill and into the Valais

The first of a special two-part crossover between our series Into the Alps and One Year: 26 Cantons, we take a walk through the Pfynwald forest to an Indiana Jones-style swinging bridge, soak in some lovely views of the Alps, and ponder a fascinating mystery of human geography. It’s a bit 99-Percent Invisible meets natural hazards geology.

Without further ado, here goes Part 1 of our visit to the wild and wonderful Canton of Valais. If you want to jump straight to the next part of our journey in Leuk visit Part 2. Thanks for joining us.

You can follow along with our two-part walk using the interactive map above

The first time I visited Switzerland’s remote Canton of Valais, I was shocked. You go from the Berner Oberland, with its lakes, dense forests, and lush green fields, into the 35 km long Lötschberg Base Tunnel and a few minutes later get launched out at 250 km/hour into the steep terraces, scrub, and craggy rock of the Valais’ Rhône River Valley. It’s almost like being transported into an entirely different world.

Of course, it wasn’t always so easy to get to this remote part of the Alps. Before the completion of the base tunnel in 2007, the train to the Valais took almost twice as long. Even earlier, before the railroad, it was a perilous journey over a steep mountain pass.

When you visit the Valais today and get surrounded by those same imposing mountains, you can still feel the isolation.

These days, excellent pistes and hiking trails make the Valais the destination of choice for many of western Switzerland’s winter ski and summer trekking holidays (the Engadin on the other side of Switzerland in the Canton of Graubünden is the more popular choice for the Zurich crowd) but, on today’s installment, we are going to be a bit more inconspicuous.

The Mystery of the Pfynwald Röstigraben

View of Leuk from near the Leuk Train Station in the Rhône River valley.

This unassuming forest may draw its name from one of two Latin terms: perhaps the more straight forward ‘pinus,’ meaning pine tree, or the more curious ‘ad fines,’ meaning at the border. At first glance, the prior term seems the better fit until one considers that the Pfynwald actually serves as the French-German language boundary in the Valais. It also happens to be one of the most prevalent oddities on the entire Swiss language map.

The Pfynwald, in combination with the Raspille stream on the other side of the valley sharply divides the Valais’ German and French dialect regions. It seems that as soon as you cross the Illbach stream in the Pfynwald, the typically Walliser Swiss German greeting of ‘Tagwohl’ is immediately exchanged for a ‘Bonjour.’

Switzerland is officially quadrilingual with four official languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansch) but you are more likely to run into an English speaker in most of German speaking Switzerland than a Swiss Italian or one of the 0.5% of Romansch speakers.

This is just to say that Switzerland’s language groups tend to stay relatively isolated from one another. Without diving deep into the complexities of Switzerland’s past, theses boundaries tend to come down to two major factors: geography and history.

Take the separation between Switzerland’s German and Italian language groups as an example, the steep mountains of the Alps form a clear and natural barrier. Not completely insurmountable, but certainly enough to explain a distinct language difference.

The ‘Röstigraben,’ or divide between French and German speaking Switzerland, named after one of Switzerland’s favorite Swiss German foods the potato Rösti, falls more to history in most places than to geography. The result, a more convoluted and blurrier boundary with a mixture of French and German speakers along the edges.

In an interesting paradox, the Pfynwald divides the almost entirely German speaking upper Valais from the lower Valais’ French speaking population. There is no clear physical boundary other than the relatively small Illbach and Rapsille (which both empty into the larger Rhône), but the divide remains sharp as a knife cutting straight across the wide ‘U’ shaped Rhône River valley. Almost anywhere else in Switzerland, this big valley would serve as a veritable language highway but here, it’s like a night and day difference.

When we met up with some friends in Leuk last month, I made it my personal quest (for better or for worse) to try and explain what I have termed the Valais’ ‘Bonjour Boundary.’

The Leuk train station sits on the valley bottom, adjacent to the Rhône River. It is well below the old town of Leuk which you can see peering out at you from the hillside high above. In the Middle Ages, the town's position on the hill had a few advantages, providing an excellent lookout point and avoiding river flooding. Today, the Valais isn’t expecting an imminent invasion and thanks to some serious mitigation measures, the river is somewhat tamed offering more space for the train and bus connections that we need to start our walk.

From the train station, we head up to the old town of Leuk in next week’s installment, but first we head west along the main road, through the industrial corner of Leuk, into the legendary Pfynwald forest.

The Pfynwald, or Bois de Finges in French, is Switzerland’s largest continuous stand of Scotts Pine, one of the largest in all of Europe. To the north, European Beech and Norway Spruce tree species dominate and to the south its mostly Oak species, but here in the Valais, the combination of a drier but still quite cold climate and rocky alluvial soils demands a hardier species. Scotts Pine fits the bill.

Across the Illbach and Into the Pfynwald

I may have undersold the Illbach a little bit for dramatic effect but as far as streams go, on any given day the Rhône presents a far greater obstacle. Nonetheless, there are only a couple of places where you can safely cross the incised stream, a road bridge carrying most of the traffic in the Valais, and a narrow footbridge deep in the Pfynwald.

To make for a nice loop, we huffed it down the main road from the train station and then returned through the Pfyn-Finges Nature Park which protects the Pfynwald forest alongside a nearly untouched seven kilometers of the Rhône river on the valley bottom.

Looking down on the Pfynwald from the otherside of the valley in Leuk

As a whole, the Pfynwald covers most of a giant alluvial fan coming out of the Illgraben, a steep valley into the mountains high above. Since the end of the last ice age and the retreat of glaciers from the Rhône River valley, the Illbach has been naturally aggrading, sweeping across the valley bottom and depositing sediment in the shape of a fan.

Crossing at the road bridge, the Illbach looks less like a stream and more like a muddy chute owing to frequent debris flows that rush down the channel during large rain events. Debris flows are a non-Newtonian mixture of water and sediment which can carry far greater material loads than water alone. Think of a muddy slurry that suddenly appears rolling boulders the size of a VW bus and you wouldn’t be far off from reality.

The same debris flows which formed the Pfynwald alluvial fan over millennia provide the first possible explanation for our language boundary. Frequent debris flows would have made living near the Illbach quite foolhardy limiting the intermingling of French and German speakers. Likewise, any road across the fan would have been regularly obliterated before modern flood control limiting the flow of people and thereby language.

Of course, there is the other side of the valley, but the topography there is much steeper and the Raspille itself is also quite incised into the landscape. The predominantly German-speaking town of Salgesch between the Raspille and Leuk, now a wine growers paradise, really only began to expand substantially from its humble medieval roots in the wake of the Second World War.

Even today, with flood control measures in place, the Illbach poses a substantial enough threat to warrant a myriad of debris flow monitoring and warning systems. Included among these are, a laser height monitor that can easily be seen sticking out from the road bridge, and a siren system that warns of incoming debris flows. Perhaps a note of caution is worthwhile here as well, if the weather isn’t looking too flash or you start hearing sirens go off, think twice about crossing the Illgraben.

Just past the road bridge, our walk turns off the main road into the Pfynwald and meanders its way up a series of forest roads towards the Bhutan Brücke, our next stop.

Looking up the Illbach from the road bridge crossing

Crossing the Bhutan Brücke

View up the Illgraben from the Bhutan Brücke

The paths through the Pfynwald are generally mild and offer some nice views of the craggy peaks above. As you amble along, you will get the smell of fresh pine and, more than likely, find the forest almost entirely to yourself. While a popular spot for locals, the Pfynwald rarely attracts many of the tourists you see crowding the trains and busses around Leuk train station.

As many of you know, Corinne and I are not big fans of heights and swinging bridges are always a bit of a challenge. At first glance, the Bhutan Brucke looks like something out of an Indiana Jones movie and, were it not for us eating lunch near its foundation, I think I would have had a few more heart palpitations than I did once we finally crossed.

Upon closer inspection, the bridge reveals a particularly solid (and relatively new) construction which quells the fear factor just a bit. The week after the Pfynwald we crossed a much longer and much higher swinging bridge in the Berner Oberland that nearly saw me puking over the side, but I will save the gory details for another week.

Crossing over the Illbach on the Bhutan Brücke

The view up the Illgraben from the swinging bridge is great (if you dare to look anywhere but straight ahead) and a keen eye might even catch a glimpse of some of the other monitoring and flood control measures in place just upstream. After crossing the bridge, you pass a small shrine that honors the collaboration between countries on the bridge construction. The path back through the forest back towards Leuk is nice and offers some sneak peeks at the other side of the valley, including a particularly odd sight, a large array of satellite dishes perched up on the hill.

As a bit of a diversion (not a physical one as the path continues straight ahead), the Pfynwald hosts a number of interesting natural science experiments.

In the first instance, researchers from Switzerland’s largest technical university, ETH in Zurich, have installed a series of weather stations, cameras, and other monitors to record the frequent debris flows coming out of the Illgraben. These recordings allow them to study debris flow initiation and flow dynamics as well as to estimate the sediment volume leaving the mountains.

While you might need to wait several years for a sizeable debris flow event anywhere else in Switzerland, researchers are guaranteed several a year here in the Pfynwald, quite an advantageous study area.

In another case, the Pfynwald hosts one of Switzerland’s longest-running forest drought experiments managed by the WSL, Switzerland’s forest research institute. Several plots are heavily monitored to continuously record, among other things, tree size, canopy color, soil moisture, temperature, and rainfall. While several of the plots are left to natural conditions, others are irrigated from a canal allowing researchers to compare the influence of decreased precipitation on forest health during and after drought.

Back on the path, we cross a bit of hummocky, or rough hilly, terrain before arriving at the Bhutan Brücke for lunch. This 134 m (c. 400 ft) long hanging footbridge, which opened in 2005, crosses about 80 m (c. 200 ft) over the Illbach just downstream of the Illgraben. The bridge owes its name (and prayer flags) to the Kingdom of Bhutan which partnered in its creation as a part of the 2002 UN Year of Mountains Campaign.

Looking up at the craggy mountains just beyond the Pfynwald

Switzerland Spying on the World

The collection of (actually quite huge) satellite dishes in Leuk owes its existence to open south-facing skies and an advantageous position at an elevation ideal for satellite communication. The site has been a source of intrigue and controversy in the Valais for decades.

Whether rumors of US National Security Agency (NSA) ties or other international espionage are valid remains questionable but the station at Leuk, made up of several independent sections, is at least partly owned by the Swiss military. The military-run portion of the array is a part of Switzerland’s ‘Onyx’ surveillance program which intercepts communications between military and civilian satellites.

Other portions of the array have seen a myriad of uses from the transmission of telecommunications to the downloading of real-time satellite weather observations. In the array’s latest iteration, some of the outdated dishes have been outfitted with solar panels to serve as a massive renewable energy source for the Valais.

Regardless of their purpose, the antennas add a real sci-fi vibe to the Valais and an interesting topic for conversation as you work your way back down the fan towards the Leuk train station.

Giant satellite dishes on the hill across from the Pfynwald in Leuk

An Alternative Explanation for the 'Bonjour Boundary'

Before we are all the way back to the train station, a quick jump back to the Valais’ language boundary. Efforts to push a highway through the length of the Rhône River Valley have been ongoing for decades but the project has been delayed at every turn. In fact, portions of the Pfynwald were already cleared for construction years ago, but building has yet to commence.

This is just the latest battle in a centuries long struggle to better connect the Upper and Lower Valais. In days gone by, the connections were historically no better and travel through the Pfynwald was considered to be so dangerous due to thieves and highwaymen that almost no one dared travel through the forest.

This likely goes hand in hand with the Pynwald’s lack of permanent residents. The forest was effectively a wilderness.

Interestingly, the Valais language boundary was not always in its current position. At times, Sierre on the other side of the Rapsille and, even Sion, much further down in the lower Valais were German speaking.

While this casts some doubt on the geographic explanation for the language divide, I get the feeling that these rather temporary arrangements were more about medieval power politics than about transmission of language. Throughout these occupations, the countryside retained its French dialect and eventually the language reclaimed those cities.

In the end, I am not sure I can call my quest to explain the mysterious Valais language boundary a true success as I don’t have a definitive answer from any reputable source, but the sharp boundary and coincidences of geography certainly offer an interesting and plausible explanation.

We hope you enjoyed hearing about our trip to the Valais’ Pfynwald forest. If you enjoyed the post, we will be back in Leuk to continue our walk up the hill on the other side of the valley. It’s a great walk with plenty of gorgeous views, castles, churches, and a crypt about as creepy as any you might find in Switzerland. You won’t want to miss it.

A sneak peak at next weeks installment in this two-part special

Until next time, gute Reise, and feel free to comment on this article on our social media. We would love it if you shared the blog with your friends.