Lauterbrunnen

Where it sits. Lauterbrunnen village lies at 795 metres on the floor of a glacial trough so straight and so steep-sided that it looks engineered. The valley runs roughly north to south for about eight kilometres from Zweilutschinen to Stechelberg, its floor barely half a kilometre wide, its limestone walls rising three to four hundred metres in a single sweep on both sides. The Weisse Lutschine, milky with rock flour, runs down the middle. Above the western rim sits the car-free terrace village of Murren, above the eastern rim sits Wengen, and at the head of the valley the Breithorn and the Jungfrau massif close it off. The German name means loud springs, and it is literal: water comes off both rims more or less continuously.

Seventy-two waterfalls, two of them famous. The valley is routinely described as having seventy-two falls, most of them thin ribbons that appear after rain and vanish in a dry August. Two are permanent fixtures. The Staubbach, directly behind the village church, drops 297 metres in a single free leap from a hanging valley, so tall that on windy days the lower half disperses into drifting spray before it lands, which is exactly what its name, dust brook, records. Goethe saw it in 1779 and it fed the imagery of his poem on the song of the spirits over the waters. A gallery hacked into the cliff lets you walk behind the curtain between roughly mid-June and October. Two kilometres up the valley the Trummelbach is the opposite case: ten cascades draining the glaciers of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau, hidden inside the mountain and reached by a tunnel lift installed in 1913, moving as much as twenty thousand litres a second in high melt.

On screen and on the page. J. R. R. Tolkien walked this valley in the summer of 1911, on a hiking trip out of Interlaken, and later wrote that his imagined Rivendell grew from that landscape; the description of a deep valley hidden below high walls with waterfalls falling into it maps onto the Lauterbrunnen floor with unusual directness, and Peter Jackson's designers worked from that lineage rather than from the valley itself. The valley has a second, quieter screen life as one of the fixed backdrops of Hindi cinema. From the 1990s onward Bombay production units treated the Lauterbrunnen floor, the meadows above Wengen and the Murren terrace as interchangeable settings for song sequences, and the coach itineraries built for Indian visitors still stop here between Interlaken and the Schilthorn.

What you actually see today. The village is one long street with a church, a handful of hotels, two large campsites and a station, and it is more workmanlike than pretty; the spectacle is the valley, not the buildings. A flat, mostly paved path runs the full length of the floor to Stechelberg, passing beneath the Staubbach and the Trummelbach and giving the classic view back up the valley with the falls on the left. From the station the Wengernalpbahn rack railway climbs east to Wengen and Kleine Scheidegg; from Grutschalp, reached by a funicular from the same station, a narrow line runs to Murren along the western rim. At Stechelberg the Schilthornbahn cable car begins its four-stage climb to 2,970 metres.

A world capital of jumping off things. The valley walls, vertical and cleanly overhanging in places, have made Lauterbrunnen one of the busiest legal BASE-jumping sites anywhere. On a good summer day jumpers hike to exit points above the western cliffs and drop past the rock in the afternoon light; the landing meadows are beside the main road, and the whole thing is visible from a bench outside the campsite. Paragliders launch from the terraces above, and the valley is also the finish of the Inferno downhill ski race from the Schilthorn each January.

Getting there and timing. Trains run from Interlaken Ost in about twenty minutes, with the Grindelwald branch splitting off at Zweilutschinen. Drivers can reach the village but not Wengen or Murren, which are car-free; large car parks sit at the station and at Stechelberg. The falls are at their most powerful from May to early July while snowmelt is running; by late August the smaller ribbons have dried up. September brings the most reliable weather and noticeably fewer people. In winter the valley floor is in deep shade for much of the day, since the sun clears the eastern wall late, which is worth knowing before booking a December room down here rather than up on a terrace.