Travel deep dive
The Watchmaking Towns: Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds
Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds, twin towns high in the Neuchâtel Jura close to the French border, are where Swiss watchmaking actually happens rather than merely where it's sold. Both were rebuilt from the ground up after devastating fires — La Chaux-de-Fonds after 1794, Le Locle in the 19th century — and both were rebuilt around the same organising principle: long, straight, evenly spaced streets designed specifically to let daylight reach every watchmaker's workbench, a genuinely functional urban plan that UNESCO recognised as a unique piece of industrial heritage in 2009.
Updated 2026-08-15
Built for daylight, not decoration
After fire destroyed much of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1794, the town was rebuilt on a strict grid of wide, straight streets running east to west, oriented specifically to maximise the number of hours each day that direct sunlight would reach the workshop windows lining them — watchmaking, before electric lighting, depended entirely on natural light for the fine, close work of assembling tiny mechanical components, and the town's entire layout exists because of that single practical need. Le Locle, a shorter distance away and following the same principle after its own reconstruction, mirrors the pattern closely enough that UNESCO inscribed both towns together as a single World Heritage Site in 2009, recognising the urban planning itself as an industrial artefact rather than listing either town for its individual buildings alone.
The result reads differently from almost any other historic Swiss town centre — no winding medieval lanes or central market square, but a rational, repeating grid of workshop-houses (maisons ouvrières) with tall windows and long, light-filled workrooms, still legible today even where the buildings now house other businesses.
La Chaux-de-Fonds: the watchmaking capital
La Chaux-de-Fonds, the larger of the two towns and one of Switzerland's highest cities at over 1,000 metres, remains genuinely tied to the industry that shaped it — major houses including TAG Heuer, Girard-Perregaux and Corum still operate here, alongside specialist component makers that supply the wider Swiss industry rather than a single brand. The International Museum of Horology (Musée International d'Horlogerie) holds one of the world's most comprehensive watch and clock collections, tracing the mechanics of timekeeping from early sundials through to contemporary movements, with a working restoration workshop visible to visitors rather than sealed away.
The town is also the birthplace of the architect Le Corbusier, born here in 1887 as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, and several of his early buildings survive in the town he later left for a very different architectural career — a genuinely unexpected second claim to fame for a town built almost entirely around mechanical timekeeping.
Le Locle: smaller, older, no less serious
Le Locle, a few kilometres from La Chaux-de-Fonds and connected by a short train ride, is generally considered the older of the two watchmaking centres, with a documented watchmaking tradition running back to the late 17th century. The town's Musée d'Horlogerie is housed in the Château des Monts, an 18th-century mansion whose collection focuses specifically on the mechanical precision side of the craft, including automatons — mechanical figures capable of writing, drawing or playing music through purely clockwork mechanisms, among the most technically sophisticated objects the watchmaking tradition ever produced outside timekeeping itself.
Zenith, one of the industry's historic manufacturing houses, has operated continuously from the same Le Locle site since 1865, and its factory remains a working production facility rather than a museum piece — a direct, unbroken link between the grid-planned streets built for 19th-century daylight and a 21st-century watchmaking operation still running on the same ground.