The Matterhorn Museum in

Zermatt Zermatt () is a municipality in the district of Visp in the German-speaking section of the canton of Valais in Switzerland. It has a year-round population of about 5,800 and is classified as a town by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO). ...

is a cultural-natural

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

whose main theme is the

Matterhorn The (, ; it, Cervino, ; french: Cervin, ; rm, Matterhorn) is a mountain of the Alps, straddling the main watershed and border between Switzerland and Italy. It is a large, near-symmetric pyramidal peak in the extended Monte Rosa area of the ...

. The museum is in the form of a reconstituted mountain village consisting of 14 houses (church, hotel, huts and granaries), and relates the history and development of

tourism Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring (disambiguation), touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tour (disambiguation), tours. Th ...

in the Zermatt area, including the story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn by

Edward Whymper Edward Whymper FRSE (27 April 184016 September 1911) was an English mountaineer, explorer, illustrator, and author best known for the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. Four members of his climbing party were killed during the descent. W ...

and party. The museum displays one of the two stones that

Claude Nicollier Claude Nicollier (born 2 September 1944 in Vevey, Switzerland) is the first astronaut from Switzerland. He has flown on four Space Shuttle missions. His first spaceflight ( STS-46) was in 1992, and his final spaceflight (STS-103) was in 1999. He ...

took from the summit and brought with him on the Space Shuttle ''Endeavour''

STS-61 STS-61 was the first NASA Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, and the fifth flight of the Space Shuttle ''Endeavour''. The mission launched on 2 December 1993 from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The mission restored the spacebor ...

mission in 1993. The other stone was put back on the summit.The Matterhorn remains a fatal attraction, Swissinfo.ch
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References

External links

Official website

Museums in Valais Zermatt History museums in Switzerland Matterhorn Alps museums {{switzerland-museum-stub