Lauterbrunnen

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. Streams from the hanging valleys and snowfields above have no gentle way down, so they simply leap off the rim. The result is a valley threaded with falling water, with the village of Lauterbrunnen, at about 800 metres, strung along its floor beneath the rock.

The emblem is the Staubbach Falls, which drops about 297 metres just behind the village and is counted as the highest free-falling waterfall in Switzerland. For much of its height the water barely touches the cliff, and in a breeze it frays into a drifting veil of spray, which is what the name, roughly "dust stream", describes. Goethe stayed at the parish house nearby and wrote his poem "Song of the Spirits over the Waters" under its spell. Farther up the valley come the Trümmelbach Falls, about 3 km away, and above the cliffs the Mürrenbach, at 417 metres the tallest waterfall in the country.

The valley's grandeur has outlived its first admirers. In 1911 the young J. R. R. Tolkien walked from Interlaken into the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and the landscape later became the model for Rivendell. The railway era turned it into a gateway: lines up to Mürren opened in 1891 and to Wengen in 1893, and those terrace villages, like Gimmelwald, remain closed to cars. From the valley floor you look up at them perched on the rim, with the high peaks of the Bernese Oberland beyond.

Getting there

Lauterbrunnen is linked by the Bernese Oberland Railway to Interlaken; the town of Thun is about 28 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Bern Airport (BRN), about 47 km away. From the village, buses run up-valley towards the Trümmelbach Falls, and mountain railways and cable cars climb to the car-free villages of Wengen and Mürren.