A Million-Franc Fence for a Swiss Forest

High above the quiet village of Surrein in the Surselva valley, a brand-new, two-and-a-half-meter-tall barrier snakes across twenty-five hectares of steep mountain terrain. It is not designed to guard a military outpost or a secure facility, but to solve an extraordinarily Swiss problem: protecting young trees from hungry deer so the village below does not get buried under rockfalls or avalanches.

The Puzzastg protective forest has reached a state of structural breakdown. Decades of severe damage caused by wild game feeding on young shoots have completely halted natural regeneration. Combined with unstable soils and aging, decaying trees, the forest can no longer guarantee the safety of Surrein against mountain hazards. As local forester Beat Cadruvi noted, the woodland is simply incapable of recovering on its own.

To break the deadlock, the municipality of Sumvitg opted for a heavy engineering fix. Designed by forest engineer Nora Zürcher-Gasser, the two-and-a-half-kilometer game fence cost roughly 1.5 million Swiss francs, funded largely by the Canton of Graubünden. Completed this summer, the enclosure cuts sharply through the Alpine landscape. Even its designer conceded that such a drastic intervention should hardly serve as a showcase model for other regions, acknowledging the severe visual impact on the landscape.

With the barrier finally sealed, the long process of artificial reforestation begins. Over twenty thousand saplings, ranging from hardy fir species to various deciduous trees, will be planted across the slope in the coming years. To manage the labor requirements, volunteers from the Bergwaldprojekt foundation are being brought in to help put the young trees into the ground. Researchers from ETH Zürich will accompany the experiment over the coming decades to study how effectively a forest recovers once wildlife is completely excluded.

The project highlights a distinctly Swiss paradox: a wealthy society willing to spend millions in public funds on steel mesh barriers and academic monitoring rather than confronting the excessive game populations that created the emergency in the first place. Whether this elaborate fencing experiment produces a self-sustaining mountain forest or merely postpones a broader political debate on hunting quotas will only become clear long after the current generation of saplings matures.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com