‘Not Heidi’: the hard work behind the Alpine idyll

It’s not the world of Heidi or the one idealised in films and television series. Life on the Alpine pastures is hard: rising at the crack of dawn, with days that never seem to end. But it’s also enriched by unforgettable moments. Swissinfo went to see the cows come home from Hinterfeld in canton Uri. Evi Rigert looks around her, a bit bereft. Among the crowd of cows she looks for her favourites and draws them to her, hugging and petting them. At the same time, the farmers load their herds onto the trailers to drive them to their barns down in the valley. Rigert is misty-eyed. “Now it’s all done at last,” she says, looking back at the meadow, now deserted, where earlier there had been about 70 cows and calves. It’s just past noon in Wassen, canton Uri, in central Switzerland. A few hours earlier was the long-awaited climax of the high pasturing season: the march down from the Hinterfeld meadows into the Meiental valley, just below the Susten Pass. Each one of these Alpine summer ...