Valais Blacknose sheep
Fly to Zermatt
An Upper Valais sheep with a black face and spiralling horns.
Out on the rocky grazing land of the Upper Valais, you can spot it from afar: a large animal with a thick, curly white fleece and a black mask. The black covers the nose and rings the eyes, and it tints the ears, knees, ankles and hooves. Rams and ewes both have horns coiled into spirals. This is the Valais Blacknose, a mountain breed built for steep slopes and foul weather.
It is sturdy: an adult ewe weighs 70 to 90 kilos, a ram up to 125. Its wool, long and coarse, grows ten centimetres in five or six months; it is shorn twice a year, for about four kilos per animal. It is raised both for this wool and for its meat.
It very nearly vanished. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the authorities and farming associations wanted to impose a single standardised, more profitable white sheep everywhere in Switzerland: the herd books of the old breeds stopped being recognised and their animals were no longer given prizes at shows. The breeders of the Upper Valais held firm. They founded their own association in 1948, and the breed was at last officially recognised in 1962. Today it has several thousand registered ewes, and flocks are kept as far afield as Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.
Since breeders have kept it for pleasure more than for a living, its look has even changed: it is now selected with a woolly face and legs, because that is prettier.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Nez noir du Valais”, “Walliser Schwarznasenschaf” (German) and “Valais Blacknose” (English).
Finding the chest
Its chest appears near Zermatt once you have discovered all its sites on the map.
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Every site of Zermatt is discovered: the chest is waiting for you near the town.
