A capital that behaves like a market town.
Sandstone arcades, a river bend, and nothing at all to queue for.
Switzerland’s capital is a sandstone town on a bend in a green river. It is quiet in a way capitals are not supposed to be. The old town is walkable end to end in an afternoon, most of it under arcades, and the day is built around slowing down rather than fitting things in.
- Duration
- A long day. Most of it is spent on foot, and very little of it is spent hurrying.
- Pickup
- Your Zurich hotel. West through the plateau, and the morning is the drive.
- Group size
- Your own party. Bern rewards a small group, because the good streets are narrow.
- Languages
- English by default. German or Turkish where that suits the family better.
- Season
- The arcades keep the rain off, so the weather matters less here than almost anywhere else on our list.
Visitors skip Bern. They go to the mountains, or to Lucerne, and the seat of government is left to the people who work in it. That is the whole argument for going. It is a UNESCO old town with no crowd standing in it, and after a week of cable cars the effect is startling.
THE ARCADES
Kilometres of covered walkway run down both sides of the main streets. Shops sit in vaulted cellars below them, reached by trapdoors in the pavement. You can cross the entire old town in a downpour and stay dry.
Fountains stand along the middle of the street, painted, on tall columns, most of them older than any building near them. One of them shows an ogre eating a child. Nobody has ever fully explained it.
Halfway along stands the Zytglogge, a clock tower with a mechanism that performs a few minutes before every hour. Get there early and stand to the side. That is where the mechanism is actually visible.
THE RIVER
The Aare wraps around three sides of the old town in a deep green loop. It is the reason the town sits where it does. In warm months people walk upstream with their clothes in a dry bag and swim back down through the middle of their own capital, which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.
The bridges across it are high. From the Untertorbrucke, the oldest of them, the town rises above you in sandstone terraces. This is the walk the guidebooks leave out.
THE VIEW AND THE REST
Cross the river and climb to the Rosengarten. The whole roofscape lies below with the loop of water around it, and on a clear day the Bernese Alps close the horizon. Coffee up there is the best half hour of the day.
Below the garden the bears live in an enclosure on the riverbank, which is either charming or odd depending on your view of civic mascots. Back in town, Einstein’s flat is a small apartment on the main street where a clerk from the patent office rewrote physics in his spare time. The cathedral tower is the highest in the country and the stairs are worth it.
WORTH ASKING
Why Bern when Lucerne is closer?
Because they are not the same experience. Lucerne is a lakeside town with famous set pieces and the visitors that come with them. Bern is a working capital that happens to be six centuries old, and the difference is felt in the first ten minutes on the street.
How much walking is involved?
More than most days on our list, though it is flat along the arcades and the only real climb is up to the Rosengarten. The car meets you at the far end of each stretch, so nobody walks back over ground they have already covered.
Can it be combined with anything?
It sits on the road toward the Bernese Oberland and toward Gruyeres and the Lavaux, so it can open or close either of those. As a single day it stands better alone.
Bern is one of the town days among the day trips from Zurich, and it belongs to the same list as every other private tour we run.