🐄 Zermatt in Miniature: The Matterhorn, the Gondolas and the Cows

After Seattle, Yosemite, the Amalfi Coast and the Dakar, I wanted to go big and detailed. Switzerland was the obvious choice. It has some of the best free 3D map data in the world, and the most famous mountain in Europe. So here is Zermatt and the Matterhorn, in miniature: the gondolas and the cable cars, the little red Gornergrat train, ski runs, chalets with red geraniums in the window boxes, alphorn players, and herds of cows on the high pastures. A few of the cows are dressed up in flowers for the trip down the mountain.

Try it first

Drag to spin it, scroll to zoom, and tilt it right down to the pastures. Fly to takes you to the Matterhorn, Zermatt village, Gornergrat and Monte Rosa, the Riffelsee, the Hörnli ridge and its hut, Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, Sunnegga and the Stellisee, the Gorner Glacier, the cows above Findeln, and an alphorn player by the Riffelsee. Under Ride along you can ride the Gornergrat train, take the gondola up from Zermatt, or fly with a paraglider. The Summer switch turns it into ski season, and the Snow button brings in a storm.

The mountain

The Matterhorn stands 4,478 m (14,692 ft) on the border between Switzerland and Italy, and from Zermatt you see it end-on: the Hörnli ridge running straight at you, the east face on the left and the north face on the right. That’s the view on every chocolate box, and it’s the one the diorama opens on. At dawn and dusk the light goes pink on the summit while the village is still in shadow. Climbers set off up the Hörnli ridge from the hut at 3,260 m in the dark, and on the diorama you can see their headlamps on the ridge before sunrise.

Zermatt

The village sits at about 1,600 m at the head of its valley, and it’s car-free: visitors leave their cars down at Täsch and ride the train in. In the diorama all 2,620 buildings in the village and on the slopes are chalets, with a white stone base, dark larch wood above, grey slate roofs, and red geraniums in boxes under the windows. At night the windows light up one by one.

Gondolas, cable cars and a cog railway

Zermatt is a lift lover’s dream, and every one of the 46 lifts on the board comes from OpenStreetMap. Each gets its towers where the real ones stand, a cable that sags between them, and the right kind of cabin. The red gondolas of the Matterhorn Express loop up from the village. The big cable cars shuttle in pairs, one up while the other comes down, and wait at the stations. The chairlifts carry their chairs over the pastures. The 3S Matterhorn Glacier Ride goes up to Klein Matterhorn at 3,883 m, the highest cable car station in Europe.

Then there’s the train. The Gornergrat railway climbs from the village through the larch woods, past the Riffelalp and the Riffelsee, to Gornergrat at 3,089 m. From there you get one of the great views of the Alps: Monte Rosa, the Breithorn, the Gorner Glacier and the Matterhorn all at once. On the diorama the little red train works its way up and down the line, and you can ride along.

Glaciers and Monte Rosa

Look south-east from Gornergrat and the whole skyline is ice. Monte Rosa’s Dufourspitze, at 4,634 m the highest point in Switzerland, stands at the end of a wall of peaks over the Gorner Glacier, the second-largest glacier in the Alps. All the glaciers on the board come from OpenStreetMap. The diorama keeps the ice off the very steepest faces, the way it is on the real mountain. The Gorner Glacier is shrinking fast. A board like this one, built every week from fresh map data, will slowly show it.

Cows, flowers and an alphorn

In summer the herds go up to the high pastures, and the diorama has 275 cows in 18 herds between about 1,750 and 2,550 m. Most are black Eringer cows, the local breed of the Valais, with some Brown Swiss mixed in, and all of them wear bells. Every so often you’ll spot one dressed for the Alpabzug, with a tall headdress of flowers and a little fir on top, and a big Treichel bell on an embroidered strap. And at a few of the best viewpoints, a man in a red vest and black hat stands playing an alphorn toward the Matterhorn.

Ski season

Flip the Summer switch off and it’s winter. Snow comes down to the valley floor, the lakes freeze, the chalet roofs turn white and the larches go bare. The cows go home to their barns, and 243 ski runs appear, marked blue, red and black just like the piste map, with skiers carving their way down them. In summer the skiing doesn’t stop completely: up on the glaciers below Klein Matterhorn the runs stay open all year, and the diorama keeps just those ones open in summer.

Night in the village

Slide the clock to Night and Zermatt glows. Every chalet has its own pattern of lit windows, the lift stations go quiet, and up on the Hörnli ridge the first headlamps start to move.

How it’s made

This one starts with the best data I’ve had for any of these. Since 2021 swisstopo, the Swiss federal mapping office, has given its data away free. That includes swissALTI3D, a model of the whole country’s ground surface on a 2 m grid, in 1 km tiles. The build script asks swisstopo’s catalog for every tile in the box, about 250 of them, and resamples them onto an 18 m grid for the diorama. The strip on the Italian side of the border, beyond swisstopo’s coverage, is filled in from Terrain Tiles on AWS. Heights are stretched a quarter taller than life so the relief reads from above.

Everything else comes from OpenStreetMap: the lifts with every tower, the railway, the 243 ski runs and their colors, the glaciers, the lakes and streams, the woods, the trails, and the 2,620 buildings, which the code turns into chalets by fitting a box and a gabled roof to each footprint. The cows are placed on open pasture of the right height and slope, in herds. The alphorn players, the flags and the paragliders I placed by hand.

As before, I built it with Claude. I brought the ideas and the wish list (the cows were my idea), and Claude wrote the code. GitHub Actions builds and publishes it, and the film was rendered there too, split across 20 free computers. The code is on GitHub.

---

Go deeper