The Most Beautiful Places in Switzerland
44 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Switzerland are Matterhorn, Lauterbrunnen and Chillon Castle. The list covers 44 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Switzerland is a small country with the Alps at its heart, and the mountains shape everything: dozens of peaks above four thousand metres, the largest glaciers in the range, deep lakes left in valleys the ice carved out. Where the terrain was hardest, Swiss engineers answered with rack railways, viaducts and tunnels that became landmarks in their own right, and in the lowlands, old towns kept their medieval bridges and towers.
The Matterhorn above Zermatt is the most recognisable mountain in the Alps, a steep pyramid with four faces turned to the points of the compass, and the Gornergrat Railway, opened in 1898, climbs by rack to a ridge facing it. In the Bernese Oberland, the north face of the Eiger is one of the most famous walls in mountaineering, and to the south the Aletsch Glacier, the longest in the Alps, flows in a broad curve of ice. The Weisshorn, a sharp triangle of rock and snow, is often called one of the most beautiful summits in the range, and Oeschinen Lake lies in a basin of cliffs above Kandersteg.
The engineering is as striking. On the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway, the curved Landwasser Viaduct carries trains on tall stone piers straight into a tunnel in a cliff, and the Gotthard Pass has been a route across the Alps since the Middle Ages. Down in the lowlands, the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen are the most powerful plain waterfall in Europe, Lucerne's Chapel Bridge is a fourteenth-century covered timber bridge with painted panels under its roof, and Bern's Zytglogge tower carries an astronomical clock from the sixteenth century.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matterhorn | Mountain | |
| 2 | Lauterbrunnen | Most beautiful village | |
| 3 | Chillon Castle | Castle | |
| 4 | Oeschinen Lake | Lake | |
| 5 | Landwasser Viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 6 | Lavaux | Vineyard landscape | |
| 7 | Aletsch Glacier | Glacier | ✓ |
| 8 | Abbey Library of St. Gallen | Library building | |
| 9 | Rhine Falls | Waterfall | |
| 10 | Eiger | Mountain | |
| 11 | Chapel Bridge | Covered bridge | |
| 12 | Zytglogge | Clock tower | ✓ |
| 13 | Weisshorn | Summit | |
| 14 | Albula Railway | Heritage railway | |
| 15 | Gotthard Pass | Mountain pass | |
| 16 | Gornergrat Railway | Rack railway | |
| 17 | Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam) | Dam | |
| 18 | Jungfrau Railway | Rack railway | |
| 19 | Castelgrande | Castle | ✓ |
| 20 | Pilatus railway | Rack railway | |
| 21 | Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway | Heritage railway | |
| 22 | Wengernalp Railway | Rack railway | |
| 23 | Abbey of Saint Gall | Monastery | ✓ |
| 24 | Brusio spiral viaduct | Viaduct | |
| 25 | Furka Pass | Mountain pass | |
| 26 | Therme Vals | Thermal bath | |
| 27 | Lion Monument | Sculpture | |
| 28 | Goetheanum | Theatre building | |
| 29 | Ruinaulta | Canyon | |
| 30 | Gornergrat | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Matterhorn
Switzerland · 37.5 km from Sion45.976° N 7.659° E
Image by moremilu from Pixabay The Matterhorn is the mountain most people picture when they think of the Alps: a near-symmetrical pyramid of rock, 4,478 metres high, standing on the watershed between Switzerland and Italy.
Did you know? The German name joins Matte, meadow, and Horn, so it means roughly the peak above the meadows.
02 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.
03 Chillon Castle
Schloss Chillon
Switzerland · 24.9 km from Lausanne46.414° N 6.928° E
Image by solilluna from Pixabay Chillon occupies a small, steep-sided oval of limestone that pushes out into the eastern end of Lake Geneva, between Montreux and Villeneuve.
Did you know? The Camera domini murals were painted in tempera between 1341 and 1343 by Jean de Grandson.
04 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.
05 Landwasser Viaduct
Landwasserviadukt
Switzerland · 23.1 km from Chur46.681° N 9.676° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Landwasser Viaduct is the image most people have of Alpine railways: six slender stone arches curving high above a wooded gorge and running straight into a tunnel mouth in a sheer cliff.
Did you know? Stone came from a limestone quarry about 500 metres downstream, linked to the site by a temporary narrow-gauge field railway.
06 Lavaux
Switzerland · 8.5 km from Lausanne46.492° N 6.746° E
Lorenz Poffet · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lavaux is a single slope, but an extraordinary one: some thirty kilometres of steep vineyard falling from the villages above to the northern shore of Lake Geneva, between the outskirts of Lausanne and the edge of Vevey.
Did you know? The final x of Lavaux is not pronounced; in Arpitan place names it was added only to show that the stress falls on the last vowel.
07 Aletsch Glacier
Aletschgletscher
Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Great Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps: about 23 km long, covering some 80 square kilometres, and holding around 15 cubic kilometres of ice.
Did you know? Of the 3.2 kilometres of length lost since 1870, about 1.3 kilometres have disappeared since 1980.
08 Abbey Library of St. Gallen
Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen
Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.376° E
Elena Ternovaja · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Abbey Library of St Gallen is Switzerland's oldest library and one of the most important monastic collections in the world, and its Baroque hall is among the most beautiful rooms in Europe. Above the door a Greek inscription announces it as a "healing place of the soul".
Did you know? Wiborada became in 1047 the first woman formally canonised by a pope, and she is now honoured as patron saint of libraries and book lovers.
09 Rhine Falls
Rheinfall
Switzerland · 3.4 km from Schaffhausen47.677° N 8.616° E
Image by adege from Pixabay The Rhine Falls is the most powerful waterfall in Europe, not tall but immensely wide and loud: the young Rhine drops about 23 m over a ledge some 150 m wide, just below the town of Schaffhausen.
Did you know? J. M. W. Turner made several studies and paintings of the falls, and Mary Shelley described her visit of 1840 in Rambles in Germany and Italy.
10 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.
11 Chapel Bridge
Kappelbrücke
Switzerland · 2.1 km from Lucerne47.052° N 8.308° E
Image by suju-foto from Pixabay For most of its life, the point of the bridge was the paintings hanging under its roof, not the crossing itself.
Did you know? The octagonal Wasserturm beside the bridge is roughly 30 years older than the bridge and served as a prison, torture chamber, archive and treasury.
12 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.
13 Weisshorn
Switzerland · 31.9 km from Sion46.102° N 7.716° E
Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Among the four-thousanders of the Swiss Alps, the Weisshorn is the one climbers most often name as the most beautiful.
Did you know? A year before Tyndall, in 1860, C. E. Mathews and the guide Melchior Anderegg tried the south side but retreated after a small avalanche, ending a 19-hour day.
14 Albula Railway
Albulabahn
Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5 The Albula line is where Swiss railway engineering turned into landscape art. Linking Thusis with St. 7 km metre-gauge railway was begun in September 1898, opened in July 1903 and extended to St. Moritz a year later. 5 percent.
Did you know? Water bursting into the Albula Tunnel during construction drove the building contractor into bankruptcy; 1,316 people worked on it and 16 were killed.
15 Gotthard Pass
Gotthardpass
Switzerland · 36 km from Altdorf46.559° N 8.562° E
Adrian Michael · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Gotthard Pass crosses the heart of the Swiss Alps at 2,106 metres, linking the German-speaking canton of Uri with Italian-speaking Ticino. At the top lies a stark, rocky saddle scattered with small lakes, the largest of them Lago della Piazza, with the old hospice beside it.
Did you know? In winter, ox-drawn sledges hauled loads of about 600 kilograms over the snow, roughly four times what a mule carried in summer.
16 Gornergrat Railway
Gornergratbahn
Switzerland · 38.8 km from Sion46.024° N 7.750° E
Kabelleger / David Gubler ( http://www.bahnbilder.ch ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Gornergrat Railway climbs from the resort village of Zermatt, at about 1,604 metres, to a station at 3,089 metres on the Gornergrat ridge, facing one of the grandest mountain panoramas in the Alps.
Did you know? Year-round service came in two steps: to the lower section in 1929, and all the way to the summit in 1941.
17 Verzasca Dam (Contra Dam)
Talsperre Contra
Switzerland · 13.3 km from Bellinzona46.197° N 8.848° E
Audrix · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Contra Dam, better known simply as the Verzasca Dam, closes the mouth of the Verzasca valley in Ticino with a single curved wall of concrete 220 metres high and 380 metres long across the crest.
Did you know? The wall contains about 660,000 cubic metres of concrete and tapers from 25 metres thick at the base to just 7 metres at the crest.
18 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.
19 Castelgrande
Switzerland · 0.5 km from Bellinzona46.193° N 9.023° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 Castelgrande is the oldest and largest of the three castles of Bellinzona, set on a steep outcrop of gneiss that rises straight out of the town.
Did you know? Excavations show that an accidental fire around the year 800 destroyed the southern part of the Carolingian fortress.
20 Pilatus railway
Pilatusbahn
Switzerland · 6.8 km from Sarnen46.956° N 8.277° E
SchmalspurDVZO · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Pilatus Railway is the steepest rack railway in the world. 6 km to a terminus just below the Esel summit of Pilatus, at 2,073 metres, with an average gradient of 35 percent and a maximum of 48 — close to one in two. The ride is short but relentless, and the lake drops away below the whole way up.
Did you know? In its first years the railway carried about 35,000 passengers annually and passed its one millionth passenger in 1901.
21 Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway
Dampfbahn Furka-Bergstrecke
Switzerland · 38.6 km from Sarnen46.561° N 8.362° E
Arthur Meyer · CC BY-SA 3.0 For more than half a century the trains of the Furka line climbed over the Alps instead of under them, and today steam engines do so again. The Furka mountain section runs about 18 km from Realp in the canton of Uri, over the watershed and down to Gletsch and Oberwald in the upper Rhône valley in Valais.
Did you know? The mountain section was electrified in 1942, so the steam trains running today restore a sight unseen for decades.
22 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.
23 Abbey of Saint Gall
Fürstabtei St. Gallen
Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.377° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Rocky187 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Abbey of Saint Gall stands at the heart of the Swiss city that grew up around it, and it holds one of the oldest and most beautiful monastic libraries in the world.
Did you know? Emperor Louis the Pious confirmed the abbey's imperial immediacy in 813, placing it directly under the emperor rather than any regional lord.
24 Brusio spiral viaduct
Kreisviadukt von Brusio
Switzerland46.254° N 10.128° E
Kabelleger / David Gubler ( http://www.bahnbilder.ch ) · CC BY 3.0 The Brusio spiral viaduct is the moment on the Bernina line when the train seems to chase its own tail.
Did you know? Between the Bernina Pass and Tirano the railway descends about 1,824 metres, which makes it one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world.
25 Furka Pass
Furkapass
Switzerland · 38.6 km from Sarnen46.573° N 8.417° E
Image by hpgruesen from Pixabay The Furka Pass carries a road over the high Alps between Gletsch in the canton of Valais and Realp in Uri, cresting at 2,429 metres.
Did you know? The federal government paid two-thirds of the cost of the 1864–1866 road, designed by the Geneva officer and mathematician Jean-Louis Aubert.
26 Therme Vals
Switzerland · 35.2 km from Chur46.622° N 9.181° E
fcamusd · CC BY 2.0 In the village of Vals, at the head of a side valley of the Graubünden Alps, Peter Zumthor built a bathhouse that reads as if it had been quarried out of the mountain rather than put on it.
Did you know? The springs of Vals also supply Valser, one of Switzerland's best-known brands of mineral water.
27 Lion Monument
Switzerland · 2.5 km from Lucerne47.058° N 8.311° E
Image by Hans from Pixabay On the morning of 10 August 1792, a mob stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris.
Did you know? From 1818 Pfyffer raised money for the monument, mostly from the royal houses of Europe.
28 Goetheanum
Switzerland · 10.7 km from Basel47.486° N 7.620° E
Wladyslaw ( talk ), edits by: Dontpanic (aka Dogcow) · CC BY-SA 3.0 On a hillside above the village of Dornach, south of Basel, stands a building that seems to have been modelled rather than built.
Did you know? The name Goetheanum replaced Johannesbau only in 1918, honouring Goethe's writings on metamorphosis and colour that shaped Steiner's thinking.
29 Ruinaulta
Switzerland · 14.9 km from Chur46.808° N 9.315° E
Image by Monikas_Wunderwelt from Pixabay Ruinaulta, the Rhine Gorge, is the canyon the Vorderrhein has cut through the debris of the Flims rockslide, one of the greatest landslides known in the Alps.
Did you know? The debris dammed the Vorderrhein and created Lake Ilanz, which persisted at around 820–840 metres above sea level for at least a thousand years.
30 Gornergrat
Switzerland45.983° N 7.785° E
Image by klausdie from Pixabay Gornergrat is a rocky ridge above Zermatt, and from its crest at 3,135 metres it offers one of the great high-mountain panoramas of the Alps.
Did you know? For its first decades the railway ran only in summer; year-round service reached the summit in 1941.
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 Switzerland?
- On our list, Matterhorn ranks first, followed by Lauterbrunnen and Chillon Castle.
- What is the longest glacier in the Alps?
- The Great Aletsch Glacier in the Bernese Alps is the longest glacier in the Alps, at around 20 kilometres. It is part of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch World Heritage Site.
- Why is the Chapel Bridge in Lucerne famous?
- Built in the fourteenth century, it is one of the oldest covered wooden bridges in Europe, with seventeenth-century paintings in the gables of its roof. Much of it was rebuilt after a fire in 1993.
- Why is the Albula Railway a World Heritage site?
- Together with the Bernina line, the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway was inscribed in 2008 as an outstanding example of railway engineering in high mountains. It uses spiral tunnels and viaducts such as the Landwasser Viaduct to climb without rack sections.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Switzerland?
- In our collection, the places in Switzerland are most often rack railways (6), waterfalls (3), funiculars (3) and heritage railways (3).
- How many places are on this list in Switzerland?
- The list covers 44 places.