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There's a frightening reason behind Switzerland's bunkers.
It's not just fictional properties like Fallout and SIlo that have the human race hiding underground, with the country containing an underground network of over 374,142 bunkers.
With the country's current population sitting at 8,943,209, that's one bunker for every 24 people, but why does the home of Toblerone have so many bunkers?
In one YouTube video, Johnny Harris is hunting for Switzerland’s hidden mountain fortresses, explaining how there's a chance that if you see a little door in a forest, it probably leads to a bunker.
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In the video, Harris says that instead of building alliances in the war, Switzerland dug to create its own defenses.
More than just ones buried in mountains that date back to World War II, Switzerland’s mass of bunkers includes thousands under people's homes.
Finding bunkers isn't too hard, and flying up a drone, he easily spots the telltale signs of their windows littering high-up vantage points.
As for why Switzerland is a bunker behemoth, Harris tells viewers: "By the 1800s, the Swiss were really good at digging into mountains, building cable cars, trains. They just got really good, and that prowess for digging became incredibly useful in the 1940s."
Explaining how Switzerland was surrounded by 'fascist regimes', Harris says Switzerland turned its entire alpine region into a giant 'redoubt' (fortress). One historian has even dubbed it the biggest Fortress in Europe.
Funneling enemies into 'choke point' mountain passes, Harris adds how the Swiss could sit in their bunkers and blast invading forces from relative safety.
With faux chalet facades and fake rocks all concealing guns, Harris warns that if something looks a little off in Switzerland, it could be part of a bunker network. After the war, Switzerland said it wasn't worth paying for all these bunkers, so decided to decommission them. Not all are abandoned, with private buyers picking up a lot of them.
The most fascinating section has him stepping inside Switzerland's largest bunker and meeting its owner.
Boasting 30,000 square meters of space, eight kilometers of walkways, quadruple-reinforced doors, a hospital, and giant cannons, it's a literal fortress in the ground.
Harris even stays in a fancy-looking bunker hotel that comes complete with original ladders and dripping water, but that's not where the story ends.
In the aftermath of WWII, the threat of the Cold War caused Swiss civilians to install their own basement bunkers to stay safe. In 1963, Switzerland's bunker policy guaranteed a bunker space for every resident of the country, including refugees and foreign workers, with the government stumping up a sizeable chunk of the production cost to encourage builds.
There's been a new wave of interest since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with one bunker supply company saying it sold more toilets in March 2022 than it did in all of 2021 and Germans in particular worrying about their lack of bunkers.
Despite the rich history of Switzerland's military and civilian bunkers, they largely have a different meaning in 2024. From fermenting mushrooms to making cheese, Switzerland continues to come up with some impressive modern uses for its bunkers.
