«Alp Archive Inventory» and «Writing Alpine History» 

In 2023, the alpine season in Switzerland was inscribed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Building on this recognition, various efforts have since been made to educate the public about both the current state of alpine farming and its «heritage».

«Inventory of Alpine Archives» is part of the project «Promoting and Communicating the Alpine Season as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage». Commissioned by the Swiss Alpine Farming Association (SAV), Rahel Wunderli is compiling an overview of the available sources and literature on the recent history (19th–21st centuries) of alpine farming in various regions of Switzerland. The dynamic, multifaceted, and significant history of this form of agriculture and the areas it utilizes is, in fact, little known—despite, or perhaps precisely because, alpine farming generally attracts keen interest and evokes many positive associations.

In the follow-up project «Writing Alpine History», the collected sources and texts will be analyzed in collaboration with laypeople and made publicly available in the form of stories about individual alpine pastures, alpine workers, and cross-regional developments in alpine farming.

One of the major challenges here is to capture the great diversity of alpine farming contexts, forms, and traditions in Switzerland without either oversimplifying them or losing sight of the commonalities and broader trends. Both the conditions for the continued existence of this cultural heritage and its capacity for development are to be identified.

The «Alp Archive Inventory» project (2025) is funded by the Federal Office of Culture, the Foundation for Art, Culture, and History (SKKG), the Fondation Sur-la-Croix, and the Leopold Bachmann Foundation. The Federal Office of Culture has pledged partial funding for the follow-up project “Writing Alpine History(ies)” (2026/2027). Additional donors are currently being sought.