← The Urbanist
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Foreign.
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Valley in Switzerland is home to the highest dam in Europe. This concrete megastructure supplies around 20% of Switzerland's stored energy and was constructed back in the 1950s. But what can we learn about today's energy challenges from this giant looming in the Swiss mountains? You're listening to Tour Stories, a Monocle production brought to you by the team behind the Urbanist. I'm Andrew Tuck. In this episode, Jessica Bridger marvels at the Grand Dixon Dam.
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Imagine standing at a height of 2,170 meters and and looking up a gigantic, nearly sheer wall, its top hundreds of meters above you. The wall spans two peaks at the top of a steep sided valley. There is an obvious feeling of force emanating from the pale concrete face. Resting your palm on its sun warmed surface, it is hard to comprehend that it was built by human hands. This is the Grand Dixon Dam in Canton Valais, Switzerland. 2025 marks its 75th anniversary. Yet the concrete wall facing you is so large that it somehow seems inevitable. Impossible that it wasn't always here. The sublime structure is 700 meters long at the top and 285 meters high. The height of the Eiffel Tower. It is the largest gravity dam in the world. 3000 workers worked day and night from 1951 until its completion in 1961. The painstaking heavy work used 6 million cubic meters of concrete and the dam is 200 meters thick at its base. A gravity dam relies on its weight to hold the water. And the Grand Dixons weighs 15 million tons. We like to talk about Switzerland's soft power, but what about its power power? The small Alpine country currently imports 70% of its energy. But for the 30% it produces, about 60% is hydropower. Grand Exhaust is a massive part of that as the force of its 400 million square meters of water are converted into 2,000 megawatts of energy annually. Almost twice that produced by a nuclear plant. One hour of energy production would power your radio. Tuned to Monocle, of course, for 4,320 years. On a visit to this marvel of power, a small cable car hoisted us up to the top of the dam. To the perfect aquamarine Lac D. Craggy bordered and wild looking. One could easily mistake it for naturally occurring if it wasn't for its one perfectly straight side. For this is a reservoir, not a lake. A stiff breeze ruffled its surface and the whole thing is both sublime and somehow forlorn and beautiful. Like a forgotten relic. People go to gawk at all kinds of tall buildings, impressive bridges. But these Monumental infrastructures, the ones that power the world, that control the flow of people, goods, ideas, capital, energy and water are too often ignored. We are somehow always trapped by our topographic, geological, geographic surroundings. We like to think of ourselves as all powerful world changing world. Destroying the very infrastructure we sometimes ignore confirms this notion. Yet our physical temporal context, existing for millennia before us and will for millennia after, determines much of our human experience, including the arc of our species history. Switzerland, that paradise of verdant grass covered Alps dotted with chalets, European industry leading factories, dense urban agglomerations, is unthinkable without its mountains. They cover 70% of its territory, but only 25% of Switzerland's population lives in them. Yet they have helped to form Swiss culture, its political structure, weather, industry, neutrality, access of European continental transport. After all, it's all about context. Would this nation of four official languages, extraordinary local cultural differences from federal state to state be possible without its tricky topography, its location in the middle of the European continent, spanning three major climate zones? Would Switzerland's hydropower wonders of the 20th century the have been thinkable elsewhere? Perhaps not today in the 21st century. Waking up high in the Swiss Alps in the morning, cozy under a down duvet and next to the dam, old workers housing was converted into a simple hotel some years ago. It is easy to imagine the massive force at work as the captured water behind the dam is channeled to power plants in the valley below. The hum of high voltage electricity is somehow in your ears. On leaving you buy a small souvenir embroidered patch of the dam, its water in blue thread and the surroundings in green gold brown. We are inextricable from nature. We attempt to delineate, to separate ourselves. But this is our fragile human ego. We have the power to build amazing things, monumental things, powerful things in this world, one which sometimes now seems so beset with trouble that we fret we've ruined. It is structures like the Grand Exance Dam that remind us that our human ingenuity is part of our nature. And finally part of nature overall. It's all about context.
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Tall Stories is a monocle production from the team behind the Urbanist and this episode was written by Jessica Bridger and produced and edited by David Stevens. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes every week. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers. Sa.