Hungerberg
A vanished village ski area at Oberwald in the upper Goms, one of the three cases the Lost Ski Area Projekt uses to illustrate the disappearance of over 40 per cent of Swiss ski areas.
- Region
- Valais
- Country
- Switzerland
- Status
- abandoned
- Reason for closure
- Not documented in accessible sources. It is recorded among the Swiss ski areas that have ceased to exist, in a national pattern attributed to snow uncertainty, the decline of the winter sports boom and simple lack of profitability.
History
Hungerberg lies above Oberwald in the commune of Obergoms, at the head of the Goms valley in the Upper Valais. It is one of three Swiss ski areas - with Erner Galen in the same valley and Winterhorn in Uri, both also recorded in this dataset - singled out by the Lost Ski Area Projekt to illustrate what has happened to skiing in Switzerland. That project, a database of every ski area ever built in the country, was begun by Christoph Schuck, a professor of political science in Dortmund, after he returned to the Valais area he had skied as a child and found it gone; his research and the book he wrote with Matthias Heise, Aufgegeben und ausgestorben, put the losses at over 40 per cent of all Swiss ski areas, with around 222 areas and valley lifts closed. This is a deliberately minimal entry: beyond its location and its inclusion in that record, nothing about Hungerberg - its opening year, its lifts, its closure date or the reason for it - is available in accessible sources, and those fields are left empty rather than guessed. It is exactly the kind of gap a public database invites local contributors to fill.
Sources and further reading
More in Switzerland
Location
46.5352, 8.3701