Travel and Tourism in Switzerland

Lucerne: The Perfect Swiss City

Lucerne is, by common consent among travellers, the most beautiful and perfectly situated city in Switzerland. It sits at the point where Lake Lucerne narrows and the Reuss River begins, its medieval centre perfectly preserved on both banks of the river, the white peaks of the surrounding mountains reflected in the lake on still mornings, and its famous covered wooden bridge, the Kapellbrucke, providing one of the most photogenic vistas in the country. Lucerne has been a major tourist destination since the nineteenth century, when English and other northern European visitors arrived by the newly built railway to take the waters, enjoy the mountain air, and explore the surrounding peaks, and it has never really lost its role as Switzerland's most visited city.

The Kapellbrucke, the Chapel Bridge, was built in 1333 and is the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe, stretching diagonally across the Reuss where it flows out of the lake. The bridge is decorated with a series of painted panels dating from the seventeenth century depicting scenes from Lucerne's history and from the lives of the saints, though most of these originals were lost or damaged in a fire in 1993 and the replacements are faithful copies. The Water Tower beside the bridge, an octagonal medieval tower that has served at various times as a lighthouse, a prison, a torture chamber, and an archive, adds a picturesque medieval verticality to the composition that makes the Kapellbrucke one of the most photographed bridges in Europe. Walking across the bridge in the morning light, watching the river traffic and the swans below, with the old city facades rising on either bank, is one of the essential Switzerland experiences.

The Lion Monument, carved directly into a sandstone cliff face on the northern edge of the old city in 1820 to a design by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, commemorates the Swiss Guards killed in Paris in 1792 during the French Revolution, when Louis XVI's Swiss Guard made their final stand against the revolutionary mob storming the Tuileries Palace. The monument depicts a dying lion, a spear thrust through his side, covering a shield bearing the French royal lily, his face expressing a stoic acceptance of death that has moved visitors for two centuries. Mark Twain, who visited in 1880, called it the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world, a verdict that has been endorsed by generations of subsequent visitors and has given the monument a literary fame that exceeds even the historical occasion it commemorates.

From Lucerne, the surrounding mountains are all within easy reach. Mount Rigi, rising to 1,798 metres above the southern shore of the lake, was known to the Victorians as the Queen of the Mountains and was one of the great early tourist destinations of the Alps, reached by Europe's first mountain railway, opened in 1871. The summit panorama, encompassing the Alps from the Santis to Mont Blanc on clear days and looking down over Lake Lucerne and the surrounding lakes from above, remains as spectacular as it was when Queen Victoria ascended Rigi in 1868 and wept at the view. Mount Pilatus, the more dramatic peak rising to 2,132 metres above Lucerne, is reached by the world's steepest cogwheel railway from Alpnachstad, a mechanical feat of engineering that still impresses despite being more than a century old, and offers views that encompass the lake, the plateau, and the northern Alps in a sweeping panorama.

Geneva: The World's City

Geneva is a paradox. It is a relatively small city of around 200,000 people, the second smallest of the Swiss cantonal capitals by population, yet it is one of the most internationally significant cities in the world, home to more international organizations than any other city except New York, and the site of negotiations, agreements, and decisions that have shaped the modern world in ways that few cities twice its size can match. Geneva's identity is defined by its internationalism: roughly forty percent of its population is foreign-born, and on any given day in the city's cafes and restaurants one hears a dozen languages. The city speaks French, with the particular precision and elegance that the French of Geneva has always had, and it has a formal, cosmopolitan elegance that distinguishes it clearly from the German-speaking cities of the north.

The Jet d'Eau, the great water jet that shoots 140 metres into the air from a pier at the end of the quai, is the symbol of Geneva and one of the most immediately identifiable landmarks in Switzerland. Originally installed as a hydraulic pressure relief valve for a water supply system in 1891 and then moved to its current position as a decorative feature in 1891, the jet operates at a pressure that pushes 500 litres of water per second through its nozzle to an astonishing height, creating a permanent white column visible from most of the city and across the lake. In the right light, particularly at sunset, it catches the sun and creates a rainbow in its spray, and on windy days it billows and sways unpredictably, occasionally drenching the unwary pedestrians on the jetty below.

The European headquarters of the United Nations occupies the Palais des Nations, a vast interwar complex built in the 1930s as the home of the League of Nations and inherited by the UN in 1946. The Palais des Nations is the largest conference centre in the world and the site of tens of thousands of international meetings and negotiations every year, from disarmament talks to refugee conventions to human rights sessions. Guided tours of the complex are available and give visitors access to the grand Council Chamber with its extraordinary ceiling mural painted by Jose Maria Sert depicting the progress of humanity, as well as the beautifully preserved interwar architecture that reflects the optimism of the League's founding moment.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, sits just outside Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, and is arguably the most important scientific installation on earth. Its Large Hadron Collider, a circular particle accelerator 27 kilometres in circumference buried 100 metres underground, is the largest machine ever built by human beings, and it was here in 2012 that the Higgs boson, the particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics as the mechanism by which other particles acquire mass, was finally observed, confirming one of the most important predictions in the history of physics. CERN offers guided tours, and the visitor centre provides an accessible introduction to particle physics that manages to convey the genuine wonder of the science being conducted underground without requiring any prior knowledge of quantum mechanics. The CERN canteen, which serves subsidized meals to the thousands of physicists and engineers who work on site, is also open to visitors on guided tours, and eating a mediocre but affordable lunch beside the people who discovered the Higgs boson has a peculiar charm.

The International Committee of the Red Cross maintains its headquarters in Geneva, and the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge, the Museum of the Red Cross, is one of the most thought-provoking museums in Switzerland, telling the history of Henry Dunant's creation and its role in conflicts from the American Civil War to the present day with intelligence and emotional honesty. The displays on the treatment of prisoners of war, the work of the ICRC in tracing missing persons, and the human cost of the conflicts in which the Red Cross has worked are occasionally harrowing but always humanizing, and the museum leaves its visitors with a sense of what organized humanitarian action can and cannot do in the face of political violence.

The Old Town of Geneva, climbing the hill behind the waterfront to the summit where the Cathedral of St Peter stands, contains some of the most historically resonant streets in Switzerland. The Cathedral is a severe Gothic building that was stripped of its Catholic furnishings during the Reformation and served as Calvin's pulpit from 1536 until his death in 1564. The archaeological excavations beneath the Cathedral, accessible through a separate entrance, reveal the layers of earlier religious buildings on the site going back to the fourth century and constitute one of the most extensive late-antique and early medieval archaeological sites in Europe. The Reformation Monument, carved into the massive retaining wall of the promenade des Bastions in 1917, depicts Calvin and three of his colleagues, Guillaume Farel, Theodore de Beze, and John Knox, as giant stone figures with the words Post Tenebras Lux, After Darkness Light, inscribed above them.

Lake Geneva offers its own set of pleasures. The Montreux Jazz Festival, held every July in the resort town of Montreux on the lake's northeastern shore, is one of the most famous music festivals in the world, though it has expanded well beyond its original jazz focus to encompass virtually every genre of popular music. Montreux is also the town where Freddie Mercury of the band Queen spent the last years of his life, and a bronze statue of Mercury by the waterfront has become a pilgrimage site for fans from around the world, his arm raised in the familiar rock-star gesture, his face captured in an expression of characteristic exuberance. The recording studios at Montreux, in the old casino that was the setting of Deep Purple's song Smoke on the Water, which commemorates a fire at the building during a Frank Zappa concert in 1971, remain active.

The Chateau de Chillon, sitting on a rocky promontory in the lake just south of Montreux, is the most visited historic monument in Switzerland, a perfectly preserved medieval castle that was the residence of the Counts of Savoy and later a prison. Lord Byron visited the dungeons in 1816, during the same summer that he and Percy and Mary Shelley spent on Lake Geneva, and was so moved by the legend of the prisoner Francois de Bonivard, who was chained to a pillar in the castle's dungeon for six years for political and religious reasons, that he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon the same evening, scratching his name into the pillar as he left. Byron's signature, or what appears to be it, is still visible.

Lausanne, at the other end of the lake from Geneva, is the seat of the International Olympic Committee and the self-described Olympic Capital of the world. The Olympic Museum on the lake shore is the most comprehensively organized sports museum in the world, covering every aspect of Olympic history from ancient Greece to the present with multimedia displays and an extraordinary collection of artifacts. The museum's setting above the lake, in gardens that descend to the waterfront, is beautifully landscaped, and the combination of architectural quality, collection depth, and location make it one of the finest specialized museums in Switzerland.

The Lavaux vineyard terraces, stretching along the steep hillside between Lausanne and Montreux above the northern shore of Lake Geneva, are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their extraordinary combination of human landscape management and natural beauty. The vineyards have been cultivated on terraced slopes above the lake since the eleventh century, when Benedictine and Cistercian monks began the work of building stone walls and creating soil on what was previously bare rock. Today the terraces run for thirty kilometres along the hillside, their Chasselas vines producing some of the finest Swiss white wines in a landscape where three suns, as the local saying goes, shine on every vine: the direct sun from the sky, the reflected sun from the lake, and the stored heat of the stone terrace walls.

UNESCO World Heritage in Switzerland

Switzerland's 13 UNESCO World Heritage Sites reflect the extraordinary density of cultural and natural significance compressed into this small country. The Old City of Bern, designated in 1983, is valued for its remarkably well-preserved medieval urban fabric, including the arcaded walkways, the clock tower, the market streets, and the fountains. The Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch region, designated in 2001 and extended in 2007, encompasses the Aletsch Glacier, the greatest glacier in the Alps, and the surrounding peaks of the Bernese Oberland, valued for their extraordinary natural beauty and geological importance. Monte San Giorgio, on the border with Italy in Ticino, is a wooded mountain whose Triassic sediments preserve one of the finest fossil records of marine life from the middle Triassic period, 245 to 230 million years ago.

The Three Castles of Bellinzona, Castelgrande, Montebello, and Sasso Corbaro, form one of the best preserved examples of medieval fortification in the Alps, built to control the most important north-south route through the Alps at the point where the Ticino valley opens into the Po plain. The Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona, in northeastern Switzerland, displays one of the finest exposures anywhere in the world of a major geological overthrust, where older rocks have been pushed over younger ones in a way that can be directly observed in the mountain landscape. The Lavaux Vineyard Terraces have already been described above.

The Rhaetian Railway, comprising the Albula and Bernina lines of the remarkable narrow-gauge railway that serves Graubunden, is designated for its extraordinary engineering achievement in connecting communities in the highest and most difficult terrain in Europe, crossing more than 200 bridges and passing through 55 tunnels on the Albula line alone. La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle are designated for their town planning, which directly reflects the requirements of the watchmaking industry. The Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, of which Switzerland contains numerous examples in its lakeside sites, are designated together with similar sites in other Alpine countries for their extraordinary preservation of Neolithic and Bronze Age lakeside settlement.

The Benedictine Convent of St John at Mustair, in the isolated valley of the same name near the Italian border in Graubunden, contains the most complete Carolingian pictorial cycle in the world, with wall paintings dating from around 800 CE that cover the entire interior of the church. The Abbey of St Gall, founded in the seventh century, is one of the most important early medieval monastic foundations in Europe, and its baroque library, the Stiftsbibliothek, containing more than 170,000 volumes and some of the finest illuminated manuscripts in the world, is among the great libraries of human civilization.