Zinal | Valais

Immediately after its founding in the summer of 1937, the Union valaisanne du tourisme commissioned Eric Hermès to create a poster promoting Valais as a tourist destination. Specifically, the commission was for: landscape, sun, folklore. Hermès, who had already designed a first poster for Valais in 1933 (see the link below), fulfilled the wishes to complete satisfaction: a summer landscape, a majestic mountain in the background, in the center a mazot on a barn, and below on the right a female farmer loading her mule with a bulging hay sheet.

And where, pray tell, is this female farmer?

Well, the people in charge of the resort of Zinal, located deep in the Val d’Anniviers, liked the poster so much that they wanted their own version with the town name—though without the female farmer, which is why Hermès actually reworked the motif. Why the female farmer had to go can no longer really be ascertained. Perhaps the mountain was supposed to stand out more?, since Zinal remains to this day a starting point for 4,000-meter peak tours in the Weisshorn massif…?

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Valais | Switzerland