Switzerland’s mountains, long the emblems of its image abroad, were once again the central focus of international attention in 2017, according to media analysis by Presence Switzerland. For good or for worse. Presence Switzerland, which conducts an annual monitoring exercise tracking the most popular images of Switzerland in foreign media, said that a renewed interest in Switzerland’s Alpine DNA was sparked by several dramatic, climate-change-related events in 2017. August saw a massive landslide in Bondo, Canton Graubünden, which claimed the lives of eight hikers. Some months previously, the ongoing phenomenon of receding glaciers threw up another grim surprise in canton Valais: the 75-year-old corpses of a couple who had gone missing in 1942. And in April, iconic mountaineer Ueli Steck died while preparing for an ascent of Mount Everest, a story that had an impact not only nationally but also abroad. Such events, the international resonance of which attest to a lasting ...
