The first three dimensions—length, height, and depth—are included on all topographic maps. The “fourth dimension” or time, also available on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swistopo). In “travel through time,” a timeline displays 175 years of the country’s cartographic history, moving forward in increments of 5-10 years. Over the course of two minutes, Switzerland is drawn and redrawn with increasing precision: ink shapes come to hard edges, blues and grays appear after the turn of the century, and in 2016, letters abandon their serifs.
Watching a single place evolve over time reveals tiny histories and vast inconsistencies. Train stations and airports were built, the gunpowder factory disappeared for the duration of the Cold War. But on some maps, in more remote areas of Switzerland, curiously, there is also a spider, a man’s face, a naked woman, a traveller, a fish and a marmot. These are not barely perceptible visual mistakes, but rather hidden drawings by the official cartographers at SwissStopo in defiance of the order to “reorganize reality”. Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so finding an invalid drawing means the cartographer has outshined his colleagues.
It also implies that the map maker has openly violated its commitment to accuracy, risking professional repercussions due to alpine rodents. No cartographers have been identified for these drawings, but nevertheless, most were discovered only after their author had already left. (Many mapmakers timed the publication of their drawings to coincide with their retirement.) More than half of the known drawings have been discarded. The latest, the marmot drawing, was discovered by SwissStop in 2016 and is likely to be removed from the next official map of Switzerland by next year. As a Swisstopo spokesperson told me, “There is no room for creativity on these maps.”
Errors – both accidental and intentional – are not uncommon in maps (17th-Century California as an islandSeattle removed from the 1960s AAA map). Military sensors have long turned nuclear bunkers into nondescript warehouses and routinely pixelate satellite images of sensitive sites. Many maps also contain deliberate errors to trap potential copyright infringers. The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying someone else’s work, he or she can simply claim to be copying the real world – ideally, the two should be alike. Map makers often rely on imaginary streets, usually no more than a block apart, to separate their descriptions from the truth (for example Oxygen Street in Edinburgh).
His entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp.
But there is another, less institutional reason for hiding something in a map. According to Lorenz Herni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these depictions are partly a joke, partly an inside coping mechanism. Cartographers, he says, are “pretty meticulous, really high-precision people.” His entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp. To maintain this type of concentration, Harney suspects they are ultimately “looking for something to get out of their daily routine.” The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their intrusive nature – the labor and secrecy required to hide one of these visual sentences.
And some of them enjoy remarkable longevity. For example, the nude woman in the painting remained hidden for almost sixty years in the municipality of Egg in northern Switzerland. Her relatively compact figure was composed in 1958 of the lush green countryside and the blue line of the river, her knees bent over the bend of the stream. She lay peacefully and unnoticed until 2012.
Many other paintings were made much later. In 1980, a Swisstopo cartographer discovered the spider on an arachnid-shaped ice field on the Eiger Mountain. It disappeared over the course of the decade and retreated into intermediate versions. Around the same time, another cartographer discovered a freshwater fish hidden in a French nature preserve near the Swiss border. According to SwissStop, the fish lived in the blue confines of a marshy lake until 1989, when “it disappeared from the surface of the lake, diving into the depths.”
It is unclear how these images passed the institute’s proofreaders in the first place. They may have been inserted only after the map was approved, when cartographers were asked to apply the proofreader’s final edits. When maps were once printed as composite layers of different colors, cartographers could create images from the interplay of different topographic elements (for example, a naked woman, composed of a blue line over a green-shaded area). Harney also speculates that cartographers may have divided their drawings at the corners of four separate map sheets, although no such examples have (yet) been found.
Some of these cryptic images point to actual topographic features: Near the town of Interlaken, where a pile of stones resembles two eyes and a nose, a 1980 version of the map shows an angular cartoon face among the trees. (According to local legend, this is a monk who was turned to stone as punishment for chasing a young girl off a cliff.) In the late 1990s, the same cartographer drew a traveler’s portrait in the margin of the map. With each house-sized shoe, the walker serves a practical purpose. Like a kind of topographic patch, he covers an area in the Italian Alps where the Swiss apparently lacked “information and data from the Italian geographical services”.
Marmot, latest illustration, hiding in plain sight in the Swiss Alps. Its thick outline was hidden in the delicate relief shadow above a glacier, which protected it from detection for nearly five years. The mountain’s hutches – short, parallel lines that indicate the angle and orientation of the slope – are twice as long as its fur. Except for his face, tail and claws, he is mostly indistinguishable from the surrounding rock. He also fits in ecologically: as an Ice Age animal, alpine marmots are comfortable at high altitudes, burrowing into frozen rock for their nine-month hibernation. In 2016, Harney revealed his location to the public on behalf of an unnamed source.
There is a certain degree of tolerance towards these drawings, which constitutes an unofficial national tradition: a Swisstopo spokesperson told me about a 1901 fish hidden in a famous painting of Lake Lucerne in the National Council palace (probably in honor of the palace’s April 1 opening, which some European countries celebrate by adding “April Fish” to the back of shirts). Nevertheless, the marmot, along with the face and the pedestrian, will be “eliminated” from the next official map of Switzerland (according to the decision of the head of cartography).
Swiss cartographers have a long-standing reputation for topographic rigor. The so-called “Seven Years’ War of Cartography” was also waged on the scale of national maps in the 1920s, with the Swiss Alpine Club advocating greater topographic detail for its mountaineering members. From aerial photogrammetry (images taken first by balloons and then by small aircraft) to aerial perspective (the natural blur that renders distant peaks with less contrast), Swisstopo is now an industry benchmark for mountains. In 1988, he was commissioned to draw Mt. Everest.
Nevertheless, the original paintings had never been authorized before. Perhaps a careful reading of next year’s Swiss maps might reveal some other nationally famous animals in the water or alpine meadows. As Juerg Gilgen, current cartographer at Swisstopo, told me, “In reality, the proof-reader is also just a human being prone to failure. And the cartographers are also just human beings who are prone to failure.”
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