Lucerne

The Chapel Bridge, the Kapellbrücke, is a covered wooden footbridge of the 14th century that crosses the Reuss on a diagonal where the river leaves the lake, 204 metres from St Peter's Chapel, which gave it its name, to the far bank. Triangular panels under its roof, painted in the 17th century, show scenes from the city's history and the lives of its patron saints, Leodegar and Mauritius. A fire on 18 August 1993 destroyed most of the bridge and many of the panels, and it was rebuilt and reopened the following year. At its bend stands the octagonal Water Tower, older than the bridge, which served the city as prison, archive and treasury. The Baroque Jesuit Church rises on the left bank beside the river, and downstream the Spreuer Bridge, the city's other medieval covered bridge, carries a 17th-century Dance of Death in its gables, next to the needle dam that still regulates the level of the lake. Both bridges are quietest early in the morning.

The old town spreads over the right bank of the Reuss in lanes and small squares. On the Kornmarkt stands the Old Town Hall, a Renaissance building completed in 1606, and beyond it the Weinmarkt, with its fountain, and the Hirschenplatz are framed by houses with painted facades. On the ridge behind the old town runs the Musegg Wall, the city's medieval rampart, with nine towers; a path follows it, and stairs inside some of the towers climb to views over the roofs, the river and the lake. The clock of the Zyt tower dates from 1535 and, by an old privilege as the city's oldest, strikes each hour a minute before every other clock in Lucerne.

North-east of the old town, the Lion Monument is a dying lion carved in 1821 into the sandstone face of a former quarry, to a design by Bertel Thorvaldsen; it commemorates the Swiss Guards who died in Paris in 1792. The lion lies pierced by a broken spear, one paw over a shield with the fleur-de-lis of the French kings, above a small pond in a shaded park. Next to it, the Glacier Garden, a museum with its own ticket, shows the potholes that meltwater under the Ice Age glacier drilled into the same sandstone about 20,000 years ago, with exhibits on the region's geology and a mirror maze from the 19th century. Between the monument and the lake stands the Hofkirche of St Leodegar, the city's principal church, rebuilt in the 1630s after a fire, with two slender pointed towers.

The station opens straight onto the lake. Beside it stands the KKL, the culture and convention centre designed by Jean Nouvel, whose concert hall is the home of the Lucerne Festival and whose thin, flat roof reaches far out over the forecourt towards the water. From the Seebrücke, the road bridge at the head of the river, the quays run east along the north shore past the grand hotels of the 19th century, with the boat landings below and Pilatus and the Rigi across the water. The lake is swimmable in summer, and the Ufschötti, a lawn beach on the shore south-east of the station, and the Lido, near the Museum of Transport, are the city's lakeside bathing places. About three kilometres east of the centre, the Swiss Museum of Transport fills a lakeshore site with halls on rail, road, water, air and space travel, with locomotives, ships and aircraft to see from close up and a planetarium. Buses, S-Bahn trains and boats stop beside it, and the museum is worth half a day.

Boats leave the quays in front of the station for the villages around the lake all year, and in the summer season five paddle steamers built between 1901 and 1928 sail among the motor ships. Boats call at Kehrsiten, where a funicular climbs to the Bürgenstock, a wooded ridge in Nidwalden with a cliff path to the Hammetschwand lift, and at Brunnen in Schwyz, where the lake turns south into its Uri arm. On that arm, below Seelisberg, lies the Rütli, the meadow where tradition places the oath that founded the Swiss Confederation, reached by boat or on foot from Seelisberg; on the far shore, south of Sisikon, the Tell Chapel stands at the water's edge where William Tell is said to have leapt from his captor's boat. Flüelen, at the end of the lake in Uri, is a day's round trip by boat from Lucerne, and the Swiss Path, a waymarked trail around the Uri arm, links the Rütli with Flüelen and Brunnen.

Weggis and Vitznau, two lake resorts on the canton's northern shore, lie at the foot of the Rigi, the free-standing massif between Lake Lucerne, Lake Zug and Lake Lauerz. From the boat landing at Vitznau, Europe's first mountain railway, opened in 1871, climbs by rack to Rigi Kulm, the summit at 1,798 metres, which lies across the cantonal border in Schwyz; from Weggis an aerial cableway rises to Rigi Kaltbad, and a second rack railway climbs the far side from Arth-Goldau, on the main line to the Gotthard. Up by one line and down by another, with the boat back to Lucerne, makes a full day. The top is a broad, grassy plateau rather than a peak, with easy paths between Kaltbad, Rigi Kulm and Rigi Scheidegg, and the view takes in lakes on several sides and a long line of Alpine summits to the south. Watching the sunrise from Rigi Kulm has drawn visitors since the 19th century, when Mark Twain made fun of missing it in “A Tramp Abroad”.

Pilatus is the jagged limestone ridge that closes the city's view to the south-west, on the border with Obwalden and Nidwalden; its highest point, the Tomlishorn, reaches 2,128 metres. Two ways lead up. From Alpnachstad, on the Obwalden shore of the lake, the cog railway opened in 1889 climbs gradients of up to 48 percent, the steepest of any rack railway in the world, and it closes in winter. From Kriens, on the edge of the city, a gondola and then an aerial cableway run all year. The classic day joins the two: about an hour and a half by boat from Lucerne to Alpnachstad, up by cog railway, down by the cableways to Kriens and back into the city by bus. From Pilatus Kulm, the summit station, short paths climb the Esel and the Oberhaupt, and a longer one follows the ridge to the Tomlishorn.

Engelberg, a resort in a high valley of Obwalden around a Benedictine abbey founded in the 12th century, is under an hour from Lucerne by narrow-gauge train. Cableways climb from the village by way of the Trübsee to Klein Titlis, just below the 3,238-metre summit of Titlis, the last stage in a cabin that turns as it rises. At the top lies a glacier with snow in every season, with a grotto cut into the ice and a suspension bridge along the edge of the cliffs, and in winter Engelberg is a ski resort.

South-west of Lucerne, the Entlebuch is a country of farms, raised bogs and forested pre-Alpine ridges, protected as a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2001. The railway from Lucerne to Bern runs through it, with stops at Entlebuch, Schüpfheim and Escholzmatt, and from Schüpfheim a PostBus climbs to Sörenberg, a small resort at the head of its valley. Above Sörenberg rise the bare limestone karst of the Schrattenfluh and the Brienzer Rothorn, reached by aerial cableway, with a view over Lake Brienz and the Bernese Alps on the far side. Walking trails cross the moors in summer, and in winter Sörenberg is a ski resort.

North-west of the city, Lake Sempach lies among the farms and low hills of the Mittelland, a lake for summer swimming and for cycling on the quiet roads around its shore. Sempach, on its eastern shore, is a small walled town, and at the water's edge just outside it the Swiss Ornithological Institute runs a visitor centre with exhibitions on the birds of Switzerland. Sursee, at the lake's northern end and on the main line from Lucerne to Olten, has an old town of gabled houses around a late-Gothic town hall.

Beromünster, in the hills east of Sursee, grew up around the collegiate church of St Michael, a medieval foundation with a Baroque interior and carved choir stalls, set among the canons' houses of its close. Willisau, in the west of the canton, is a small walled town entered through its old gates, known across Switzerland for the Willisauer Ringli, hard ring-shaped biscuits, and for a jazz festival that has brought international musicians to the town since the 1970s.