The Most Beautiful Places in Bern
13 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Bern are Eiger, Zytglogge and Oeschinen Lake. The list covers 13 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The canton of Bern stretches from the Swiss plateau and its capital city to the Bernese Oberland, where the north wall of the Alps rises abruptly above lakes and deep glacial valleys. Few places in the world show such dramatic relief so close to towns and farmland, and from the nineteenth century onward, the Swiss answered the challenge with engineering: rack railways, funiculars and cableways that carry passengers up faces once reserved for climbers.
In Bern itself, the Zytglogge, the medieval clock tower in the old town, has marked the hours with an astronomical clock and moving figures since the sixteenth century. In the Oberland, the Eiger's north face, one of the great challenges of mountaineering, looms over Grindelwald. The Lauterbrunnen valley is a classic U-shaped glacial trough walled by cliffs, with Staubbach Falls dropping almost straight down beside the village, and Trümmelbach Falls thundering through a series of corkscrew gorges inside the mountain.
The railways and lifts are destinations in their own right. The Wengernalp Railway is the longest continuous rack railway in the world, and the Jungfrau Railway tunnels through the Eiger and Mönch to reach the Jungfraujoch. The Brienz Rothorn Railway still runs steam rack locomotives, the Niesenbahn climbs a perfect pyramid with a service stairway beside it, and the Gelmerbahn is one of the steepest funiculars anywhere. Higher still, Oeschinen Lake lies turquoise below cliffs and glaciers above Kandersteg.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eiger | Mountain | |
| 2 | Zytglogge | Clock tower | ✓ |
| 3 | Oeschinen Lake | Lake | |
| 4 | Jungfrau Railway | Rack railway | |
| 5 | Lauterbrunnen | Most beautiful village | |
| 6 | Wengernalp Railway | Rack railway | |
| 7 | Staubbach Falls | Waterfall | |
| 8 | Gelmerbahn | Funicular | |
| 9 | Trümmelbach Falls | Waterfall | |
| 10 | Niesenbahn | Funicular | |
| 11 | Schilthorn Cableway | Aerial tramway | |
| 12 | Brienz Rothorn Railway | Rack railway | |
| 13 | Titlis Rotair | Aerial tramway |
01 Eiger
Switzerland46.578° N 8.005° E
Image by Atarythm from Pixabay The Eiger is only 3,967 m high, lower than its neighbours the Mönch and the Jungfrau, but its north face is the most storied wall in the Alps.
Did you know? Lucy Walker became the first woman to climb the Eiger in July 1864, accompanied by six guides including Christian Almer.
02 Zytglogge
Switzerland · 3.8 km from Bern46.948° N 7.448° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Karlheinz Klingbeil · CC BY 4.0 The Zytglogge — Bernese dialect for "time bell" — is the tower that Bern tells time by, and has done for six hundred years. It began around 1218–1220 as the gate tower of the city's western wall, a squat structure only 16 m high.
Did you know? The walls are about 2.6 m thick on the west, where they formed part of the city defences, but only 65 cm on the east side facing the town.
03 Oeschinen Lake
Oeschinensee
Switzerland46.498° N 7.727° E
Günter Seggebäing, Coesfeld · CC BY-SA 3.0 Oeschinensee is a lake set at the foot of a wall. At 1,578 metres above Kandersteg in the Bernese Oberland, it lies in a basin closed on three sides by the cliffs and glaciers of the Blüemlisalp and the Doldenhorn, which tower far above the water.
Did you know? Water leaving the lake seeps through the old landslide debris and re-emerges below as the Öschibach, which supplies Kandersteg with drinking water and electricity.
04 Jungfrau Railway
Jungfraubahn
Switzerland46.585° N 7.961° E
Salamanamanjaro ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Jungfrau Railway climbs from Kleine Scheidegg, at 2,061 m, to the Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 m — the highest railway station in Europe.
Did you know? The first 2 km open-air section to Eigergletscher was built entirely by hand, without machines.
05 Lauterbrunnen
Switzerland46.600° N 7.909° E
Image by ELG21 from Pixabay Few valleys in the Alps show the work of ice as plainly as Lauterbrunnen. The glacier that once filled it carved a textbook U-shape: a flat floor rarely more than a kilometre wide, walled by limestone cliffs that rise sheer for up to a thousand metres.
Did you know? The place first appears in records in 1240 under the Latin name in claro fonte, meaning at the clear spring.
06 Wengernalp Railway
Wengernalpbahn
Switzerland46.576° N 7.944° E
Kabelleger · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Wengernalp Railway climbs from the valley of Lauterbrunnen over the pass of Kleine Scheidegg and down again to Grindelwald, right under the north faces of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. Opened in 1893, it runs for about 19 km and is the longest continuous rack railway in the world.
Did you know? In its first season in 1893 the railway carried 37,742 passengers, with a fleet of eight steam locomotives and nine passenger coaches.
07 Staubbach Falls
Staubbachfall
Switzerland46.590° N 7.906° E
Adrian Michael · CC BY-SA 3.0 Staubbach doesn't so much fall as dissolve.
Did you know? The fall measures 297 metres and ranks among the highest waterfalls in Switzerland, behind the Seerenbach Falls above Lake Walen.
08 Gelmerbahn
Switzerland · 32.1 km from Sarnen46.614° N 8.309° E
Gzzz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Gelmerbahn climbs a granite wall above the Grimsel Pass road at a maximum gradient of 106 per cent — steeper than 45 degrees — which makes it the steepest open funicular in Europe.
Did you know? The open car takes 24 passengers plus an operator and can carry up to ten tonnes, a legacy of its days hauling construction loads.
09 Trümmelbach Falls
Trümmelbachfälle
Switzerland46.569° N 7.915° E
JoachimKohler-HB · CC BY-SA 4.0 Trümmelbach Falls are a waterfall hidden inside a mountain.
Did you know? Average flow is about 3 cubic metres per second, but at the peak of the melt it can rise to several times that.
10 Niesenbahn
Switzerland · 35.2 km from Bern46.639° N 7.690° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Seen from the shore of Lake Thun, the Niesen looks almost too regular to be real: a near-perfect cone rising above the mouth of the Kander valley, which is why the Swiss call it their pyramid. Its summit stands at 2,362 metres, and the Niesenbahn climbs almost the whole of it.
Did you know? The lower section as far as Schwandegg was finished in 1908, two years before the line reached the summit.
11 Schilthorn Cableway
Luftseilbahn Stechelberg – Schilthorn
Switzerland46.562° N 7.858° E
Image by Julius_Silver from Pixabay The cable car from Stechelberg to the Schilthorn is a staircase of ropes climbing out of the steep-walled Lauterbrunnen valley to a summit at 2,970 metres in the Bernese Oberland.
Did you know? For the film the cabins were painted orange and given Blofeld's coat of arms; the colour, meant to be temporary, stayed until the cabins were replaced in 1995.
12 Brienz Rothorn Railway
Brienz-Rothorn-Bahn
Switzerland · 20 km from Sarnen46.787° N 8.037° E
Johnw · Public domain Most Swiss mountain railways went electric long ago; the Brienz Rothorn Railway never did. 6 km from the shore of Lake Brienz to a summit station at 2,244 metres, and most of its trains are still pushed up the mountain by steam locomotives.
Did you know? Competition from newly opened lines such as the Schynige Platte railway and the Jungfrau Railway hit its finances soon after opening.
13 Titlis Rotair
Switzerland · 20.2 km from Stans46.771° N 8.423° E
Björn Söderqvist · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Rotair is the final stage of the long climb from Engelberg to the top of the Titlis, and it does something no cable car had done before: as the cabin rises, its floor turns slowly through a full circle, so that every passenger, wherever they stand, gets the whole panorama.
Did you know? A scale model of the Rotair runs in Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland, curiously placed in the layout's Austrian section.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Bern?
- On our list, Eiger ranks first, followed by Zytglogge and Oeschinen Lake.
- What is the Jungfraujoch?
- The Jungfraujoch is the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch, reached by the Jungfrau Railway through tunnels in the Eiger and Mönch. Its station, at 3,454 metres, is the highest railway station in Europe.
- How many waterfalls are there in Lauterbrunnen?
- The Lauterbrunnen valley is often said to have 72 waterfalls pouring from its cliffs. The best known are Staubbach Falls by the village and Trümmelbach Falls, which runs inside the mountain.
- What makes the Niesenbahn stairway famous?
- Beside the Niesen funicular runs a service stairway with 11,674 steps, listed by Guinness World Records as the longest stairway in the world.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Bern?
- In our collection, the places in Bern are most often rack railways (3), waterfalls (2), funiculars (2) and cable cars (2).
- How many places are on this list in Bern?
- The list covers 13 places.