The Swiss who stayed
The story begins in the 1960s, as Bhutan was opening cautiously to the world under His Majesty the Third Druk Gyalpo and the first development partners arrived. Among them was Fritz Maurer, a Swiss agronomist who came to help develop the agriculture of the Bumthang region — and who fell for the high central valleys, settled there, married into the community, and made Bumthang his home for the rest of his life. Over the decades he introduced to the valley the skills of his own Alpine homeland, so suited to this high, cold, pastoral country: cheese-making, brewing, apple cultivation, improved dairy farming. The Swiss-Bhutanese connection he began is the distinctive note in modern Bumthang's economy, and one of the gentlest, most human episodes of the country's emergence.