Why Alpine Dry Stone Walls Built Without Cement 400 Years Ago Are Still Waterproof Today

Why Alpine Dry Stone Walls Built Without Cement 400 Years Ago Are Still Waterproof Today The global cement industry is worth $400 billion a year, and every dollar of it depends on you believing that you need a binder to keep water out of a wall. In the Valais Alps, farming communities built walls without any binder at all — dry stone, no mortar, nothing applied to the surface — and those walls have been waterproof for four hundred years. In this video I break down exactly how the geometry of the wall does what cement cannot, why mortared walls in Alpine conditions fail from the day they are built, and the specific finishing step the original builders applied that has been completely absent from dry stone construction guides for over a century — and that is the reason the 1620s walls are still performing while newer dry stone walls in the same valleys are not.