Jungfrau-Aletsch

The Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch property was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2001 and extended in 2007, and covers some 824 km² between the cantons of Bern and Valais. It was the first natural property in the Alps.

Its central element is the Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps: some twenty kilometres long and more than nine hundred metres thick at its deepest, fed by the firn fields of the Konkordiaplatz, where three streams of ice meet. Its retreat has been documented precisely since the nineteenth century and is one of the most cited indicators of climate change in Europe.

To the north rises the wall of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, one of the most celebrated high mountain faces in mountaineering, and to the south the ground drops towards the Rhône valley in a gradient running from permanent ice to valley-floor vineyards. That range supports a complete succession of vegetation belts and a rich alpine flora. The property also includes the Aletsch forest, an ancient stand of Swiss stone pine at the glacier's edge, and it has been central to the development of glaciology: the studies of ice movement carried out here in the nineteenth century founded the discipline.