Small enough to walk. Almost never walked.
The old town, the bridges and the lakefront, given the whole day.
Lucerne is the town almost everybody means when they say they want to see a Swiss town, and almost nobody actually sees, because the standard day gives it forty minutes between a mountain and a coach park. This is the other version. Your private driver takes you in early, you walk, you eat sitting down, and the mountain is somebody else’s day.
- Duration
- A full day if you want the museums, a comfortable half day if you only want the old town.
- Pickup
- Zurich hotel, early enough that the Chapel Bridge is still quiet when you reach it.
- Group size
- One household, one guide, and a town that suits four people better than forty.
- Season
- A rare day that improves in bad weather, because almost all of it can be walked under cover or indoors.
There is a version of Lucerne that fits in the gap between a cable car and a bus, and it consists of one photograph of a wooden bridge. Then there is the town, which has a medieval wall you can climb, one of the strangest museums in Europe, a lion carved into a cliff, and a waterfront that was built for people with nowhere to be. Walking it takes hours. Having the hours is the point of this day.
Written about this day
The lake this town sits on deserves a day of its own, and that is the private boat. Both sit inside the wider list of day trips from Zurich.