Inside the Gotthard Redoubt: How Secret WWII Military Bunkers Now Guard the World’s Private Gold

On Sunday, 28 January 1940, a train loaded with 88 tonnes of gold set off down the Schöllenen gorge. The rack railway was painfully slow, and the crew had to shovel fresh snow off the line. Its cargo came from Fort Bühl, an artillery fort at Andermatt that sits right above the Gotthard rail tunnel. The historian Ludo Groen pieced that journey together from the Swiss National Bank’s archives, and it is a good place to start the story of Swiss mountain gold vaults.

In 1938, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) finished a gold depot inside Fort Bühl, built to hold around 1 billion francs. At the time, that was roughly 200 tonnes of gold. Once war broke out, General Henri Guisan had much of it spread across other mountain sites, and by 1940 he had made the Alps the heart of Swiss defence.

Eight decades on, the mountains still guard gold, but much of it now belongs to private clients. After the Cold War, the army emptied its bunkers, and a handful became private vaults. Here is how a central bank’s emergency plan turned into a business, what non-bank gold storage in Switzerland really means today, and what it costs. A calculator further down does the sums for you.

Why the Swiss National Bank hid its gold in the mountains

In the mid-1930s, Europe was arming fast, and the gold the SNB kept at home sat in two city vaults, in Bern and Zurich. Both were easy targets. So the SNB's chief treasurer, Erich Blumer, started doing sums. In 1936, he worked out that evacuating the reserves from Bern alone would need 67 lorries, for 22,000 gold bars, 12,000 bags of coins and the banknotes.

The obvious answer was to put the gold where an invader would struggle to follow. That idea is the seed of today's Swiss mountain gold vaults. Offers soon arrived. The Jungfrau Railway, for instance, suggested its Eismeer station, a gallery cut into the Eiger at 3,161 metres. The bank turned it down. Guarding a vault on a mountain face would have been too expensive and impractical.

Instead, the SNB chose a site the army already guarded. Switzerland had been fortifying the Gotthard since 1886, soon after the rail tunnel opened in 1882. Fort Bühl, built in 1892, guarded the northern approach at Andermatt. The bank completed its gold depot there in 1938 and moved two-thirds of its gold into it, with a colonel named Hans Possert in charge of planning and supervision.

That choice made practical sense, and it also carried a message. The Gotthard was the old heart of the Confederation, the place where Swiss myths and Swiss engineering meet. Our story of the Gotthard Base Tunnel explains why this one mountain matters so much to the country.

The route up: snow, lorries and a rack railway

Moving gold into the Alps was less glamorous than it sounds. The SNB's convoys were usually two to four lorries with five or six men. With the bank's three-tonne trucks, a single delivery could carry up to 50 million francs in gold, so even a big transfer took many trips.

Each run left a paper trail, because this was still a Swiss bank. One receipt from May 1940, for example, shows 62 francs in expenses for a gold transport from Bern to Interlaken, including lunch for two drivers and five carriers. Secrecy, however, mattered more than thrift. Journalists, tourists and spies all used the same roads.

Fort Bühl was the hardest place to reach. From the north, the only way into the Urseren valley is through the Schöllenen gorge, a granite canyon where the Reuss crashes beneath the Devil's Bridge. For the gold, that meant what Groen calls an "excruciatingly slow cog railway". According to his book, the transports ran in minus eleven degrees, through snowstorms and under the threat of avalanches.

The gold did not stay long. In November 1939, Guisan ordered 700 million of the billion francs in the Gotthard depot moved to Interlaken, as part of spreading the reserves across the Alps. Hence that snowy train in January 1940. Today the trip from Göschenen takes a few minutes. If you make it, imagine rack-railway wagons creeping through the gorge with a fortune aboard.

Guisan's Réduit: the fortress that already held the gold

In June 1940, France collapsed. Suddenly Germany, Italy and German-occupied France surrounded Switzerland. The army could not hope to hold the long northern border, so its commander, General Henri Guisan, chose another plan. On 12 July 1940, the army adopted the Réduit, or National Redoubt: troops would pull back into the Alps and turn the mountains into a fortress.

On 25 July, Guisan gathered his senior officers on the Rütli meadow to explain the strategy. Three fortress zones would anchor it: St-Maurice in the west, the Gotthard in the centre and Sargans in the east. Germany drew up invasion plans that summer, but it never carried them out. Our articles on the bridges rigged to blow and the camouflaged bunkers show how the army built the Réduit.

For the SNB, the Réduit confirmed a plan already under way. When the army moved into the mountains, the bank's gold was already there, at the Gotthard and in Interlaken. During the war, according to Groen, the bank moved new shipments into the mountains within days of their arrival.

There is an uncomfortable side to this, too. The depots began as protection against an enemy. As the reserves grew, the city vaults could no longer hold all the incoming metal, and the mountain stores helped Switzerland keep trading gold, including with Nazi Germany. We cover that record in Switzerland and Nazi gold.

A network of hidden gold depots

Fort Bühl was only the start. During the war, the SNB built a whole network of Swiss mountain gold vaults, from the foothills to the Réduit.

In Interlaken, one of six heavy-duty ammunition magazines became the bank's second gold depot. Two engineers, Ferdinand Rothpletz and Friedrich Lienhard, helped expand its tunnel for the gold, and Blumer travelled there from Bern once or twice a month. The bank also fitted bunkers into the cellar of Spiez Castle on Lake Thun.

The most surprising site was at Amsteg, in the canton of Uri. In July 1941, the government ordered a bunker there for the Federal Council, the Swiss cabinet, to use if the army retreated into the Réduit. When Blumer inspected its strongroom in 1942, he found it too damp and its doors too weak. Even so, the SNB kept gold bars and coins in the bunker's vehicle garage from 1941 to 1945.

The commercial banks made plans of their own. The Union Bank of Switzerland rented the Gstaad Palace and planned a vault under its sun terrace, while Credit Suisse bought a run-down hotel in Interlaken as an evacuation site. Not every hotel plan went ahead. Explore every site on the map below.

Goldfinger's neighbours: gold in the Cold War

In 1964, James Bond came to the Gotthard region. The crew shot several scenes of Goldfinger on the Furka Pass road, just west of Andermatt. According to Groen, the petrol station where Bond stops his Aston Martin was close to the Gotthard depot, where the SNB still kept 19,845 gold bars. Neither the film crew nor the audience had any idea.

Throughout the Cold War, the mountains stayed central to Swiss defence planning. By 1945, the country had already spent an estimated 8 billion francs on bunkers, at 2008 prices. The franc, for its part, remained legally tied to gold, even after the 1970s had turned it into the world’s favourite safe-haven currency. For many years the SNB held about 2,590 tonnes, one of the largest official reserves in the world, and the tie only ended in 2000, after voters approved a new constitution in 1999.

Selling the gold, and a vote to keep it

The bank then sold 1,300 tonnes between 2000 and 2005 and another 250 tonnes in 2007 and 2008. Since then, it has held 1,040 tonnes. In 2013, it revealed that it keeps about 70% in Switzerland, 20% at the Bank of England and 10% at the Bank of Canada. It has never said where the Swiss share lies.

Not everyone liked the sales. In 2014, an initiative demanded that the SNB hold at least 20% of its assets in gold, never sell any and bring all of it home. Voters rejected it by 77.3% on 30 November 2014. The vote showed a very Swiss instinct: gold is a symbol, but it is not a strategy. Our pieces on Swiss banking secrecy and why Switzerland is so rich follow the money further.

From army bunkers to private gold vaults

The end of the Cold War emptied the mountains. In 1995, the Army 95 reform cut troop numbers by a third, to 400,000, and from the mid-1990s it vacated and declassified most of its fortresses and bunkers. Over the next two decades, the army sold many of them to private buyers. Cheese makers, mushroom farmers, museums, a hotel and data companies moved in.

Only a few became Swiss mountain gold vaults, or Gotthard bunker gold storage of any kind. In 2016, the Swiss defence department told Bloomberg that about ten former bunkers were storing gold and computer data. The popular idea of dozens of gold-filled caverns is, in other words, an exaggeration.

Amsteg: from cabinet bunker to private vault

Amsteg is the best example. Dolf Wipfli, an engineer from Uri, heard in 1995 that the army was selling bunkers, and his company, Swiss Data Safe, bought the old Federal Council shelter in the late 1990s. Getting the permits took years. By 2006, it held data, archives, art, precious metals and gemstones. In 2017, swissinfo reported that the bunker belonged to Swiss Gold Safe, which stores valuables there. So the vault where the SNB once kept wartime gold now holds private wealth.

Further down the valley, at Attinghausen, work on an army command bunker started in 1948. In 2011, the newly founded Deltalis turned it into a data centre, but the company left the colocation business in 2018.

The supply has now dried up. On 18 September 2023, army chief Thomas Süssli announced that Switzerland would stop selling its bunkers, as the war in Ukraine revived interest in defence. New private vaults are therefore being dug from scratch. Near Lungern, Brünig Mega Safe is building about 20 caverns under more than 100 metres of rock in the Brünig massif. In August 2026, swissinfo reported that work was well advanced and the vaults were due to open in 2027.

Non-bank gold storage in Switzerland: how it works

Why would anyone choose Swiss mountain gold vaults over a bank? The usual answer is trust. Ludwig Karl, the chief operating officer of Swiss Gold Safe, told CNBC in 2025 that the company's clients "have lower trust in government or financial systems". Behind that feeling sits a real legal difference.

At a bank, you can hold gold in three ways. A metal account is just a claim on the bank: St. Galler Kantonalbank, for one, warns that if the bank fails, the account becomes part of the bankruptcy estate. Physical custody means you own specific bars held in your custody account. A safe-deposit box means you own whatever is inside, while the bank simply rents you the space.

Non-bank gold storage in Switzerland works through a storage contract under the Swiss Code of Obligations. The vault keeps your bars separately, records them in your name and returns the same pieces to you. Because they remain your property, they are not part of the vault company's assets if it goes bust.

There are also practical points. Investment gold is exempt from Swiss VAT, but silver, platinum and palladium carry 8.1% unless they stay under customs bond, which is why many vaults offer bonded storage for those metals. The largest bonded store in the country is the Geneva Freeport, whose history goes back to 1849. Vault companies are not banks, so FINMA does not supervise them the way it supervises banks. Finally, a box in a vault is not a bank account, but that doesn't change your duty to declare wealth where you are tax-resident.

Calculator: what would your gold cost to store?

Swiss mountain gold vaults rarely publish prices, and storage fees vary more than most people expect. The calculator turns francs into kilos and bars, then compares published fees for each type of storage. Planning to store more than 50,000 francs outside the banking system? Pick that option to jump to the list of operators.

Who runs non-bank vaults in Switzerland?

If you want to store gold outside the banking system, these are the main types of operator: security and logistics groups, specialist Alpine vaults and dealers with their own storage. We list them in no particular order, and we have no commercial relationship with any of them.

Questions to ask any vault before you sign

A bunker makes a good story, but a contract makes good storage. Before choosing any vault, in a mountain or at an airport, get clear answers to these questions:

1. Is my metal allocated and segregated, and will I get a bar list with serial numbers, weights and refiners?
2. Who owns the vault, and what happens to my bars if the operator goes bankrupt?
3. Who is the insurer, what is the limit, and what does the policy exclude? Many policies exclude war, terrorism and nuclear risks.
4. Who audits the holdings, how often, and can I see the report?
5. Can I visit, inspect my bars, or send my own auditor?
6. What does it cost to leave, including withdrawal, transport and any re-assay?
7. If I store silver or platinum, does the vault keep it under customs bond?
8. Which documents do you need from me? Serious operators will ask for identification and proof of where the money came from.

These questions apply to Swiss mountain gold vaults as much as to airport warehouses. Any operator who is vague about the first four points is telling you something important.

Timeline: gold in the Alps from 1886 to 2026

These are the moments that turned the mountains into a vault.

Where to see the Gotthard fortresses today

You can't visit a working gold vault, but you can walk through the fortresses that once guarded the gold route.

• Sasso San Gottardo: built in 1941–45 on the Gotthard Pass for the Réduit, in service until the end of 1998 and open to visitors since 2012. Its tunnels show how the army planned to live and fight inside the mountain.
• Forte Airolo: the first of the Gotthard forts, completed in 1890 above Airolo, at the southern end of the rail tunnel. It is now a museum.
• Fort Bühl, Andermatt: where the SNB opened its first Gotthard gold depot. It is not a museum and not normally open to the public, but the road and railway from Göschenen pass close by.
• The Schöllenen gorge and the Devil's Bridge: the route every gold convoy had to climb. Walk it in summer and look for the fortified doors in the rock.

The Gotthard Pass road usually closes from late autumn to late spring, so check opening dates before you go. For more on bunkers hidden in plain sight, see our guide to the Swiss nuclear bunker law.

Quiz: true or false?

What Swiss mountain gold vaults say about Switzerland

The gold in the Alps tells a familiar Swiss story. A small country without an army big enough to win a war decided to make itself too costly to attack. It then put its wealth where that defence was strongest.

That logic has outlived the threat. The SNB no longer needs Fort Bühl, and the army has stopped selling its bunkers. Still, private clients from around the world pay to keep their bars inside Swiss granite, because the mountains promise something that a bank statement can't: a place that feels beyond the reach of crises.

That promise deserves a careful look, however. A vault is only as good as its contract, its insurer and its owner. Moreover, the history of these depots includes gold that Switzerland should never have accepted. As our story of Swiss neutrality shows, the country's safety has often depended on being useful to everyone. The mountain vaults are that idea, carved into rock, and they are not going anywhere.

FAQ: Swiss mountain gold vaults

Sources and further reading