Beauty Spots near Bern

I’m sure all of you host visitors now and then, whether they are close friends staying in your homes for a week or acquaintances passing through for a day or two. Have you developed favorite places to take them? We certainly have. The first outing is always a tour of Bern’s Old Town, which inevitably includes many of the places I’ve mentioned in my books, from the Bear Park to the Minster and the Rose Garden to the Matte neighborhood along the river.

For visitors who stay longer, we have more faraway favorites to share. These aren’t secret tips but well-known tourist attractions within an hour’s drive of our apartment in Bern. What’s important about these places is that visiting them regularly is as much of a pleasure for my husband and me as we hope it is for our guests who see them for the first time. Here are three of our top destinations.

The first and most breathtaking is Lauterbrunnen, a short, narrow valley in the Bernese Alps enclosed on three sides by a dramatic wall of mountains rising hundreds of feet above the valley floor. After heavy rain or a significant thaw, water cascades over the cliffs along the rock face, the drops seeming to float down to the land below. Apart from these spontaneous torrents, the valley is home to many permanent falls, including the Staubbach, which pours in a great flood almost a thousand feet to the ground.

The village of Lauterbrunnen at one end of the valley, with its small, whitewashed church, is lovely. Still, the highlight of the valley for me is another, even more striking display of water than the Staubbach—the Trümmelbachfälle. Two miles—a short bus ride—from the village, there’s a cliff that isn’t solid rock. Instead, it hides a set of ten cascading waterfalls. Over millennia, meltwater running off the Bernese Alps has worn deep, narrow channels in the stone. Now—thanks to an elevator, hidden staircases, and sets of narrow platforms and pathways—visitors can watch the water racing down through these rocky tunnels to the meadow below, where it is transformed into a quiet creek. The icy spray, the roar of the water, its astonishing speed, and the strange rock formations it has created all make this an extraordinary experience.

The second place we like to take tourists is Murten (Morat in French), a town in the Canton of Fribourg on a small lake that shares its name. Murten is as peaceful as the Trümmelbach Falls are loud and wild. Founded in the 1100s, the little town has preserved its fifteenth-century streets and houses, a small but beautiful castle with a view of the lake from its courtyard, a dramatic clock tower, and parts of its original city walls. Under the command of a Bernese knight, Adrian von Bubenberg, those walls and the people they sheltered withstood an attack by Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, in June 1476. On the thirteenth day of the siege, the city was rescued by Bernese troops. Caught between the soldiers who emerged from the besieged city’s gates and the knights and archers coming over the hills outside the walls, the Burgundian army was decisively defeated. Visitors standing on the walls today can look down at the fields where the battle was fought.

A short walk downhill from the town center leads to the shores of the lake, where a visitor can take a boat ride to the other side, swim if it’s warm enough, or sit on a shady bench and gaze across the lake at Mount Vully. This 2,000-foot peak is famous for its walking trails, white wines, and great views of the Lakes of Murten, Biel, and Neuchâtel, as well as the Jura Mountains.

I can’t move on from Murten without mentioning its famous pie or “Nidlechueche” (literally, cream cake). The dough and filling contain only butter, cream, milk, eggs, flour, water, and a pinch of salt. Despite the simplicity of the ingredients, the filling has a distinctive taste beloved by locals—and my husband.

This mention of dairy products brings me to the last of my three favorite places to take visitors: the tiny village of Gruyères, located on a steep hill in Fribourg’s pre-Alps. The town, once the seat of a family of counts, gave its name to the cheese still made in the region, as well as to a thick, smooth cream that is 50% fat. If you order a cup of coffee in Gruyères, it will be served with this extraordinarily crème de Gruyère in a small “pot” made of chocolate.

In this one-street medieval village lined with old-fashioned shops, cafés, and restaurants selling cheese, cream, and Swiss-made products for tourists, there is more to do than drink creamy coffee. Visitors can buy tickets to the imposing thirteenth-century castle at the far end of the main street, which is an art and history museum. Near the castle is another museum showing a large collection of bizarre but fascinating paintings and sculptures by H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist who created the creatures in the “Alien” movies and other films.

Downhill from the medieval village, in the modern part of Gruyères, is the cheese factory, where it’s sometimes possible to watch Gruyère cheese being made in industrial-sized batches. There’s also a short audio tour about the process. This is interesting, but impersonal, and only becomes part of our visitors’ program if the weather is too rainy or cold for country walks—or if our guest is determined to acquire free samples of cheese!

Do any of you have a favorite nearby beauty spot or local attraction to take your out-of-town guests to?

Almost all of these photographs come from Wikipedia or tourist websites about these famous places. However, three were taken from a website, Pexels, that provides photos free of charge as long as the photographer is credited. Thank you, Stephen Leonardi (Lauterbrunnen Valley and the Staubbach Falls), Alla Melashtchenko (the walking path in the valley), and Sergei Gussev (castle and street in Murten).

The large opening photograph shows Murten’s city walls and, beyond the town, the Lake of Murten and the Jura Mountains.