Andermatt is in the Urseren valley, on the headwaters of the river Reuss and surrounded by the Adula Alps.

Of the rest of the land, 1.7% is settled (buildings or roads) and the remainder (52%) is non-productive (rivers, glaciers or mountains).

To the north the steeply descending Schöllenen Gorge links Andermatt with Göschenen and is the location of the famous Devil's Bridge.

The town is served by a Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB) owned and operated railway station.

The station is connected with Brig and Visp (Valais) and with the western terminus of the Rhaetian Railway at Disentis/Mustér (Grisons).

Archaeological finds dating back to 4000 BC indicate that the Urseren was already populated in the Neolithic period.

[6] In 1649, with the emergence of an independent Swiss Confederation, the ecclesiastical rights of the Disentis monastery were revoked in favour of civil legislation.

[citation needed] Nearby Schöllenen Gorge is the site of a memorial commemorating the 1799 campaign of the Russian general Alexander Suvorov.

Here the infrastructure for the High Command of the Swiss Federal Army in the event of war was built.

[7] Plans to build a series of reservoirs in the valley of Andermatt, the Urseren, encountered fierce resistance by the locals in 1946 and were abandoned four years later.

[9] Several avalanches, in particular in the winters of 1951 and 1975, have caused havoc in some residential areas of Andermatt, killing some residents.

[citation needed] By the 1930s the village's income from tourism had seriously declined, and many of the Ursental's hotels were abandoned or changed use.

By the turn of the 21st century, as an alternative to the expensive skiing resorts in the Grisons (Graubünden) at St Moritz and Gstaad, Andermatt's fortunes again revived; it has seen considerable expansion and is currently[when?]

[17] The gas station Aurora, near the Gemsstock departure, appears in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.

In November 2012 Andermatt appeared on the British television series The Gadget Show, where presenters Jason Bradbury and Pollyanna Woodward were testing electric bicycles, scooters, and several mobile phone photo editing applications, on the hills of Nätschen.