Zurich and Switzerland, in plain English on MyZurich

One day in Zurich

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Zurich is small enough to do properly in a day and dense enough that a badly planned day misses most of it. This route walks a loop from the main station, and everything on it is within twenty minutes of everything else.

Total walking is around 5 km with the hill, or 3 km without. Nothing here needs a car and almost nothing needs a tram.

The short version


09:00	Bahnhofstrasse, station to the lake
10:00	Fraumünster and the Chagall windows
11:00	Lindenhof and the west-bank lanes
12:30	Lunch in Niederdorf
14:00	Grossmünster and the tower climb
15:30	Boat on the lake, or the Kunsthaus if it rains
17:30	Uetliberg for the sunset

Shift it an hour later in summer; the light lasts until nine.

The ten most beautiful towns in Switzerland

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The most popular towns in Switzerland are not the most beautiful ones. Popularity is measured in visitor numbers, and visitor numbers follow ski lifts, conference centres and airports as much as they follow architecture.

This is a different list: chosen for the old town, the setting, and the amount of the country’s character concentrated in one place. It is a personal ranking, and it is meant as a route-planning tool — take it with what there is to do and you have a first trip.

Jungfraujoch

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The Jungfraujoch is the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, and the railway station cut into it at 3,454 metres is the highest in Europe. It is marketed as the Top of Europe, which is a stretch, and it is the single most expensive day out in Switzerland, which is not.

It is also genuinely extraordinary, and the whole area — Jungfrau-Aletsch — is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Below the terraces lies the Aletsch Glacier, the longest in the Alps: some 20 km of ice curving away south, with nothing man-made in sight.

The churches of Zurich

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Do not come for the decoration. Zurich was where Huldrych Zwingli launched the Swiss Reformation in the 1520s, and the reformers stripped the churches out — images removed, altars gone, organs dismantled, walls whitewashed. What is left is stone, proportion, light, and the occasional patch of medieval fresco that survived under the plaster.

Which turns out to be enough. The three main churches stand within five minutes of each other on either side of the Limmat, and each has one thing you cannot see anywhere else.

The panoramic trains

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Switzerland’s scenic railways are the country’s other great attraction, and they are a genuinely good way to spend a wet day — you see the mountains from a warm seat and nobody has to walk anywhere.

Before the list, the one thing that saves the most money.

The trick: the same track, without the branding

A panoramic train is a normal train with better windows and a reservation fee. The Glacier Express, the Bernina Express and the rest run on ordinary public track, and the ordinary regional service covers the same route, all day, at standard fares with no reservation at all.

Bern

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Bern is the seat of the Swiss government, and the fact surprises almost everyone — Zurich is bigger, Geneva is more famous, and neither is the capital. Bern got the job in 1848 precisely because it was the compromise nobody objected to, and it has stayed modest about it ever since.

The old town is UNESCO-listed, and it earns that in a specific way: about six kilometres of covered arcades, the longest continuous run in Europe, sheltering shops and cafés along almost every street in the centre. It rains here; the arcades mean you can spend a wet day outdoors.

Zermatt

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Zermatt sits at 1,600 m at the closed end of the Mattertal, and it exists for one reason, which is standing at the end of the main street.

The Matterhorn is 4,478 m, it is almost a perfect pyramid, and it is on the Toblerone packet. It was the last great Alpine peak to be climbed — Edward Whymper’s party reached the summit on 14 July 1865, and four of the seven died on the way down when a rope broke. The village has been in the mountaineering business ever since, and the graves of climbers fill a corner of the churchyard.

The Rhine Falls

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The Rhine Falls is the largest waterfall in Europe by volume — not by height, which is a modest 23 m, but by the sheer quantity of water going over: around 250 cubic metres a second in summer, and up to 600 in flood.

It is 150 m wide, it is loud, and it is 50 minutes from Zurich by train. That combination makes it the easiest big sight in Switzerland to reach, and the busiest.

Lauterbrunnen

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Lauterbrunnen is a trench. The valley floor is flat, green and about 400 metres wide; the walls on either side are limestone, near-vertical, and roughly 400 metres high. Water comes off the top of them in seventy-two waterfalls, most of which have no name.

The name means nothing but springs, which is accurate.

J. R. R. Tolkien walked here in 1911 and the valley became Rivendell — the sketch he made on the trip is recognisably this place. It is worth knowing before you arrive, because the first sight of it does feel invented.

Lavaux: the terraced vineyards of Lake Geneva

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Lavaux is a 30 km strip of vineyard terraces on the north shore of Lake Geneva, running from the eastern edge of Lausanne to Vevey and the Château de Chillon. It covers about 830 hectares, which makes it the largest contiguous vineyard area in Switzerland, and since 2007 it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

What UNESCO listed is not the wine but the landscape: eight centuries of dry-stone walls, built and rebuilt on a slope steep enough that much of the work is still done by hand.

Montreux

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Montreux sits at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, in a fold of hills that shelters it from the north wind. The result is a microclimate mild enough for palm trees, magnolias and cypresses to grow outdoors at the latitude of Vienna, which is why the nineteenth century built a row of Belle Époque hotels along the water and called it the Swiss Riviera.

The town itself is a strip: a promenade several kilometres long, hotels on one side, lake on the other, and mountains rising behind. Most of what you come for is on that strip or a short walk from it.

Interlaken

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Interlaken means between the lakes, and that is exactly what it is: a flat strip of land two kilometres wide separating Lake Thun from Lake Brienz, with the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau filling the horizon to the south.

Be clear about what it is for. Interlaken itself is a nineteenth-century resort town — a long main street of hotels, watch shops and adventure-sports agencies around a green field where paragliders land. Nobody comes for the town.