Canton of Bern, Switzerland

Bern, the canton's capital and the seat of the Swiss parliament and government, keeps an arcaded sandstone Old Town on a loop of the Aare, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with the Zytglogge clock tower, the Münster and the Federal Palace. Its main station is the hub of the canton's railways: Thun is about 20 minutes away, Biel/Bienne about 25 and Burgdorf, at the edge of the Emmental, about a quarter of an hour, so the city makes a base for day trips into the lowland half of the canton.

Thun stands where the Aare flows out of Lake Thun. Its castle, built by the dukes of Zähringen around 1200, rises over an old town where the Obere Hauptgasse runs on two levels, with a raised walkway along the roofs of the street-level shops. Boats cross the lake from Thun to Interlaken, calling at Oberhofen, whose castle stands at the water's edge in a lakeside park, and at Spiez, where a castle and its church sit above a small bay ringed by vineyards; the paddle steamer Blümlisalp still sails the lake in summer.

Interlaken lies on the flat neck of land between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Its two stations divide the work: Interlaken West serves the town centre and the Lake Thun boats, and Interlaken Ost is the starting point of the trains to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald and of the Lake Brienz boats. From the Höhematte, the open meadow in the middle of the town, the view runs up the valley to the Jungfrau. Just south of the town, at Wilderswil, a rack railway leaves in summer for the Schynige Platte, with its alpine garden and a full view of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

South of Interlaken, the Lauterbrunnen valley is a deep glacial trough between sheer rock walls, and 72 waterfalls come down them. The Staubbach Falls drop 297 metres from the cliff above Lauterbrunnen village, and further up the valley the Trümmelbach Falls carry the meltwater of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau through a chain of cascades inside the mountain, reached by a lift in the rock. Wengen, on a sunny terrace above the eastern side of the valley, has no road: the rack railway from Lauterbrunnen climbs to it and on to Kleine Scheidegg, and the Lauberhorn races, with the longest downhill course of the World Cup, end in the village every January. Mürren, on a cliff terrace across the valley, is car-free too, reached by cableway and a short railway from Lauterbrunnen or by cableway from Stechelberg by way of Gimmelwald. From Mürren the cableway continues to the Schilthorn, 2,970 metres, whose revolving summit restaurant, Piz Gloria, was a set for the James Bond film “On Her Majesty's Secret Service”.

Grindelwald, reached by road and by train from Interlaken, spreads over an open valley at the foot of the Eiger, whose north face, about 1,800 metres of rock and ice, rises almost straight from the pastures. Cableways climb from the village: a gondola to First, from where a path of about an hour leads to the Bachalpsee, a small lake that mirrors the peaks; the Eiger Express from Grindelwald Terminal to the Eigergletscher station of the Jungfrau Railway; and a gondola from the same terminal to the Männlichen. The panorama trail from the Männlichen to Kleine Scheidegg, under the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, is a classic easy walk of the region.

The Jungfraujoch, the saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, holds the highest railway station in Europe, at 3,454 metres. The Jungfrau Railway, opened in 1912, starts at Kleine Scheidegg, stops at Eigergletscher, where the Eiger Express from Grindelwald meets it, and then runs through a tunnel of about seven kilometres inside the Eiger and the Mönch. At the top, a lift climbs to the Sphinx terrace and observatory, passages lead into the Ice Palace carved into the glacier, and an outdoor plateau opens onto snow in every season. To the south, the Aletsch Glacier, the largest in the Alps, begins its run down into the Valais; the Jungfrau-Aletsch World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2001, spans both cantons.

At the eastern end of Lake Brienz, the smaller of the two lakes, Brienz is the woodcarving village of the Oberland and the starting point of the Brienzer Rothorn railway, a steam rack railway that climbs in summer to just below the 2,350-metre summit. On the south shore, the Giessbach Falls come down to the lake in fourteen cascades, and a funicular climbs from the boat landing to the falls; the paddle steamer Lötschberg sails the lake in summer. Between Brienz and Meiringen, the Ballenberg open-air museum has gathered more than a hundred farmhouses and rural buildings from all over Switzerland in its woods and meadows, with gardens, farm animals and craftspeople at work.

Meiringen is the main town of the Haslital, the upper valley of the Aare above Lake Brienz. Just outside the town, walkways run through the Aare Gorge, a narrow limestone cleft about 1.4 kilometres long, to Innertkirchen. On the other side of the valley, a funicular climbs to the Reichenbach Falls, where Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes over the edge in “The Final Problem”. From Innertkirchen the pass roads climb over the Grimsel into the Valais and over the Susten into Uri, both open in the summer months, and the Brünig road and railway cross north to Lucerne.

Kandersteg, at the head of the Kander valley, is the starting point for the Oeschinensee, a mountain lake under the cliffs of the Blüemlisalp reached by gondola and a short walk, and for the car-carrying trains that run under the Lötschberg to Goppenstein in the Valais. Adelboden, up a side valley from Frutigen, hosts a men's World Cup giant slalom on the Chuenisbärgli every January, and its ski area links over the ridge with that of Lenk at the head of the Simme valley. Gstaad, in the Saanenland at the canton's south-western corner, is a resort of wooden chalets around a car-free main street; the Menuhin Festival fills the churches of the Saanenland and a festival tent with classical music in summer, and the narrow-gauge railway through Gstaad runs on to Montreux on Lake Geneva.

East of Bern, the Emmental is a country of steep green hills, scattered farms and wooden farmhouses under great hipped roofs that come down almost to the ground. Emmentaler, the cheese with the large holes, is made from raw milk in village dairies here, and at Affoltern im Emmental a show dairy lets visitors watch it being made in copper vats. Burgdorf, at the mouth of the valley, is a market town with a castle of the Zähringer dukes above its old town, and Langnau, in the heart of the Emmental, lies on the railway from Bern to Lucerne. From spring to autumn village teams play Hornussen, in which a puck is struck off a ramp with a long flexible stick and the fielders stop it in flight with wooden boards.

Biel/Bienne, at the north-eastern end of Lake Biel at the foot of the Jura, is Switzerland's largest bilingual city, with German and French side by side on its street signs. It is a watchmaking city: Omega and Swatch have their headquarters here, with museums open to visitors. Along the lake's north-western shore, the wine villages of Twann and Ligerz lie between the water and terraced vineyards of Chasselas, linked by a path through the vines, and at the south-western end stands La Neuveville, a small French-speaking town with its old town on the lake. Boats from Biel call at the villages and at St. Peter's Island, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent some weeks in 1765 and which is joined to the shore at Erlach by a long strip of land. Canals link the lake to the lakes of Neuchâtel and Murten, in the neighbouring cantons.

North of Biel, the Bernese Jura (Jura bernois) lies on the French side of the Röstigraben: long limestone ridges, high pastures dotted with spruce, and valleys of small watchmaking towns. The railway from Biel climbs into the Vallon de Saint-Imier, where Longines, founded in Saint-Imier in 1832, still makes its watches and keeps a museum, and runs on to La Chaux-de-Fonds in the canton of Neuchâtel. The Chasseral, at 1,607 metres the highest summit of the Bernese Jura, looks south across the Mittelland and its lakes to the line of the Alps. Tête de Moine, the cheese that is shaved into rosettes rather than cut, comes from the abbey of Bellelay in these hills.