Beds VS

VS is the abbreviation for the canton of Valais in Switzerland and is used to avoid confusion with other entries of the name Betten .

beds

State :

Switzerland

Canton :

Valais (VS)

District :

East of Raron

Municipal municipality :

Bettmeralp

Postal code :

3991

Coordinates :

648640 / 136 432 coordinates: 46 ° 22 '39 " N , 8 ° 4' 15" O ; CH1903: 648640 / one hundred and thirty-six thousand four hundred and thirty-two

Height :

1203 m above sea level M.

Area :

26.4 km²

Residents:

423 (December 31, 2013)

Population density :

16 inhabitants per km²

Website:

municipality.bettmeralp.ch

Bettmeralp with Bettmerhorn

map

Parish before the merger on January 1, 2014

Betten , in the Valais German local dialect Bättu [bætʊ] , is a parish of the dean's office in Brig and until December 31, 2013 was a municipal parish in the Eastern Raron district in the German-speaking part of the Swiss canton of Valais . On January 1, 2014, the municipality merged with Martisberg to form the new municipality of Bettmeralp . The current district of Betten is the seat of the community authorities and the school of the new community.

geography

The former municipality consisted of the districts of Dorf and Egga in Betten on a terrace of the Rhone Valley at an altitude of 1200 m and the Bettmeralp in the Aletsch area at 1950 m. This can only be reached by cable car or on foot; the narrow driveway is not public. Bettmeralp is located in the area of the Jungfrau-Aletsch-Bietschhorn mountain region, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002 .

History and place name

Historic aerial photo by Werner Friedli from 1955

The place is first mentioned in 1243 as Bettan . The origin of the name is unclear. The proposal by Johann Ulrich Hubschmied and Hans Ulrich Rübel to trace it back to an old Alemannic * bet (w) un and thus to explain it as a "birch tree" fails because such a word is nowhere used, very different from the Latin betula "birch" or Old High German birka "birch", which can be found in Valais place and field names in realizations such as Biola or Bürchen . The explanation of the Swiss Idiotikon and Stefan Sonderegger to explain the place name Betten by means of the Swiss German generic word bed in the sense of «Wildheuplanke, Flühbett, Heubett», fails again because «bed» in Valais as / bett /, the place name as / would be pronounced. Folk etymologically , the place name is related to the verb pray ; During the plague of 1720/30, the residents are said to have prayed so loudly that they could be heard down into the valley.

In church terms, Betten belonged to Mörel until 1910 . In 1676 and 1853 the village burned down almost completely. Tourism began around 1930, and in 1951 the aerial cableway was built from Hauptstrasse 19 in the Rhone Valley to Betten, on which a serious accident occurred in 1972 with 12 fatalities. In 1974 a second, much larger, railway was built directly onto Bettmeralp, and in 1985 a road to Betten followed. The economic focus is increasingly shifting to Bettmeralp due to tourism.

population

Population development
year	1850	1880	1900	1930	1950	1980	2000	2013
Residents	294	350	311	287	373	494	449	423

Attractions

Village church of Betten

literature

Philipp Kalbermatter: Beds. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . 2017 .
Walter Ruppen: Beds. In: The art monuments of the canton of Valais. The district of Ostlich-Raron, Vol. 3. Ed. By the Society for Swiss Art History (= Art Monuments of Switzerland. 84). Wiese, Basel 1991, ISBN = 3-909158-58-7, pp. 178–207.

Web links

Commons : Beds - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Betten VS on the ETHorama platform
Official website of the Betten community

Individual evidence

^ Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland , Volume V 1b. In the Goms villages further to the east, according to the unprinted material of the language atlas, the pronunciation bato [bætə] applies ; this is in the Lexicon of Swiss Community Names, ed. from the Center de Dialectologie at the University of Neuchâtel under the direction of Andres Kristol, Frauenfeld / Lausanne 2005, p. 146 incorrectly given as a pronunciation on site.
↑ See Iwar Werlen u. a .: Oberwalliser name book (in progress), also lexicon of Swiss municipality names . Edited by the Center de Dialectologie at the University of Neuchâtel under the direction of Andres Kristol. Frauenfeld / Lausanne 2005, p. 146 f.
^ Charles Knapp, Maurice Borel, Victor Attinger, Heinrich Brunner, Société neuchâteloise de geographie (editor): Geographical Lexicon of Switzerland . Volume 1: Aa - Emmengruppe . Verlag Gebrüder Attinger, Neuenburg 1902, p. 240, keyword beds ( scan of the lexicon page ).

[1] Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland , Volume V 1b. In the Goms villages further to the east, according to the unprinted material of the language atlas, the pronunciation bato [bætə] applies ; this is in the Lexicon of Swiss Community Names, ed. from the Center de Dialectologie at the University of Neuchâtel under the direction of Andres Kristol, Frauenfeld / Lausanne 2005, p. 146 incorrectly given as a pronunciation on site.

[2] See Iwar Werlen u. a .: Oberwalliser name book (in progress), also lexicon of Swiss municipality names . Edited by the Center de Dialectologie at the University of Neuchâtel under the direction of Andres Kristol. Frauenfeld / Lausanne 2005, p. 146 f.

[Geogr.Lex-3] Charles Knapp, Maurice Borel, Victor Attinger, Heinrich Brunner, Société neuchâteloise de geographie (editor): Geographical Lexicon of Switzerland . Volume 1: Aa - Emmengruppe . Verlag Gebrüder Attinger, Neuenburg 1902, p. 240, keyword beds ( scan of the lexicon page ).