Draped over an Alpine valley, the village of Zermatt has one of the finest vistas in Europe, sweeping upwards towards the crooked peak of the Matterhorn in one direction and the Gornergrat ridge in the other.
If one hotelier has his way, the view will be augmented with the tallest building in Switzerland.
Heinz Julen, 61, an entrepreneur and architect from the area, hopes to build a 260m (850ft) skyscraper with 65 storeys, at a projected cost of roughly half a billion euros.
Provisionally named Lina Peak, the development would include 32 floors of affordable housing for locals and a 2,500-seat concert hall, and the 30 top storeys would be reserved for luxury flats, which would largely be intended for wealthy foreign investors.
The project is pitched as a vertical solution to the village’s desperate shortage of living space. It has a permanent population of about 5,800 people that routinely swells to 40,000 in the winter months. Average house prices have risen to nearly 20,000 Swiss francs (£18,800) per square metre, among the most expensive on the continent.
“We have big problems with the housing crisis,” Julen told SRF, the Swiss public broadcaster. “There’s no space for locals and so many of them simply move away.”
Lina Peak would include 32 floors of affordable housing for locals
HEINZ JULEN
Yet not everyone is convinced that a tower higher than anything in Frankfurt or Madrid is the right answer.
When Julen presented his proposals at a public meeting last month, he likened it to a cliff standing firm in the storm of Zermatt’s economic difficulties, sheltering the population.
He said he had already acquired a plot of farmland in the valley below the town. The building would be constructed on a square base measuring 40m on each side. There would be a thousand parking spaces at its foot. It would be equipped with a sports centre, a nursery, shops and restaurants.
However, some residents raised concerns that Lina Peak might exacerbate Zermatt’s troubles with overtourism or spoil the view, in the way that the similar but much smaller Tour D’Ivoire (Ivory Tower) in Montreux does.
Many Swiss have responded with an ironic shrug of the shoulders, pointing to the number of previous plans for mega-projects that have failed and the need for a public vote on the reclassification of the land for planning purposes.
“Why not just hollow out the Matterhorn and build flats inside it, with a lift to the top?” wrote one.
Another commented: “Hopefully it will be tall and wide enough that you can’t see the Matterhorn from the village any more. Then it will no longer be so interesting for the tourists and maybe the apartments will get cheaper.”