Staubbach Falls

Staubbach doesn't so much fall as dissolve. The water drops almost 300 metres from a hanging valley above Lauterbrunnen in close to freefall, with so little rock contact on the way down that the wind gets hold of it and shreds it into a fine, swirling mist — "Staub" is German for dust, and from a distance the falls really do look like a curtain of dust rather than water. It's one of roughly 72 waterfalls that drop into the same glacially carved valley, but it's the one that made Lauterbrunnen famous first.

That fame is 18th-century, not modern. Goethe visited in 1779, was struck by the sight of water disintegrating down a sheer 300-metre wall, and wrote a poem about it — "Gesang der Geister über den Wassern" ("Song of the Spirits over the Waters") — directly inspired by what he saw. Byron came through in 1816 and, characteristically, went bigger: he described the falls as looking like the tail of the pale horse from the Book of Revelation, streaming out in the wind. Rousseau and the Swiss scientist-poet Albrecht von Haller had already been writing about the valley for decades before either of them arrived, and between the four of them they did more to put Lauterbrunnen on Europe's map than any guidebook.

The valley itself explains why a waterfall this dramatic exists at all: it's a textbook hanging valley, carved by a smaller glacier that couldn't keep pace with the much larger ice mass grinding through the main Lauterbrunnen trough. When the ice retreated, the smaller side valley was left stranded high on the cliff face, and its stream now has nowhere to go but straight down.

Good to know

Staubbach has no glacier feeding it directly, just snowmelt and rain from the hanging valley above, so its flow is far more weather-dependent than the ice-fed falls elsewhere on this list — it can thin to a wisp in a dry spell.

Best time to visit

Late spring and early summer, when snowmelt is at its peak, give the fullest flow; the falls are floodlit on some summer evenings.

Getting there

28 km from Thun. Bern Airport (BRN) is about 48 km away.