Damian’s Websurf on the unusual ways of Swiss waters
Switzerland is often referred to being the “Water-castle” of Europe, no other country on the continent has more springs, rivers, waterfalls and lakes in such a high concentration on so little land. More than half of Swiss domestic electricity is produced by 556 hydroelectric power plants, generating some 19 million gigawatt hours a year (www.expatica.com/ch/about/country-facts/35-facts-about-Switzerland_100041.html). One famous example is the worlds tallest gravity dam, Grande Dixence in Valais (www.grande-dixence.ch). Many of you may remember it from the James Bond movie “Golden Eye”, where Bond bungee jumps off the over 200 meter tall concrete wall (www.ticino.ch/en/commons/details/-Goldeneye-Bungee-Jumping/77102.html).
In this episode of Damian’s Websurf I would like to share with you some of the unusual ways of Swiss waters, which my wife and I have experienced on our travels through my home country in recent months.
The snow covered peaks and glaciers of the alps are the source of the water richness of Switzerland. One of these glacial valleys is the Lauterbrunnental, which is also known as the valley of the 72 waterfalls (www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/lauterbrunnental.html) . We visited the most unusual of these, the Trümmelbachfall, Europe’s largest subterranean waterfalls (http://www.truemmelbachfaelle.ch). Accessible via platforms and slippery galleries by foot, the melting waters of the Jungfrau glacier thunder and roar past you through the inside of the mountain and up to 20’000 litres of water shoots towards the valley floor (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trümmelbachfälle).
Water played a major part for the earliest settlers of Switzerland, the Pfahlbauer (pile builders) constructed their dwellings along the shorelines of our major lakes. Neuchatel is home to the Laténium museum which we visited last summer (http://latenium.ch). It explains how the Helvetians and later the Romans used the lake very effectively for their every need, such as the construction of ingenious fishing traps.
The levels of lake Neuchatel and the lake of Biel were artificially lowered some 100 years ago, to facilitate easier boat travel and reduce the risk of flooding. This revealed the remnants of entire townships (now known as the La Tene culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tène_culture) that led early historians to belief that the settlers had constructed their houses on platforms that stood in the shallow water, hence the name Pfahlbauer. (www.geschichte-schweiz.ch/pfahlbauer-pfahlbauten.html)
On a trip to the Val de Travers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val-de-Travers), famous for its absinthe, we went to see the Subterranean mills in the Cols-de-Roches built in the 16th century (www.lesmoulins.ch). The depth and water flow within the naturally existing caves was harnessed in from the 16th century onwards to power mills for grinding up flour or power timber saws. It is truly remarkable to consider the generations of people who worked there underground in the high humidity at a constant 7 degrees year round.
Did you know that the most visited tourist attraction in Switzerland is indeed a waterfall? We recently went to see the Rheinfall (www.rheinfall.ch) near Schaffhausen and were surprised to learn, that Europe’s widest and largest waterfall attracts more visitors than any Swiss mountain. We have already made plans to visit further watery points of interest in Switzerland. We intend to go on a Kanalsafari in Basel (www.ideenreich.ch/main.html), to visit the underground rivers, which were only covered up in the 1950 (www.altbasel.ch/dossier/birsig.html).
