Grindelwald

Where it sits. Grindelwald spreads along the floor and the lower slopes of the upper Lutschental at about 1,034 metres, a long strung-out village in the canton of Berne rather than a compact one, with its chalets climbing the sunny northern side of the valley. What fixes it in the memory is the wall opposite. The north face of the Eiger rises 1,800 metres of near-vertical limestone directly above the meadows, close enough that from a hotel balcony you can follow the ledges with binoculars, and beside it stand the Wetterhorn to the east and the Mettenberg between the two glacier basins. Grindelwald is the only village in the Jungfrau region with road access to that inner amphitheatre, which has made it both a climbing base and a mass-tourism gateway for a century and a half.

Glaciers, guides and the Eiger. The village grew from scattered farms into a resort in the mid-nineteenth century when British visitors came to see the Upper and Lower Grindelwald Glaciers, which then pushed their snouts far down towards the valley floor and could be reached on foot from the church. Both have retreated dramatically since; the lower one now ends in a gorge you enter through a tunnel, and the ice you see from the village is a fraction of what the Victorians drew. The Eiger north face gave the village its darker fame. After a series of fatal attempts in the mid-1930s the wall was finally climbed on 24 July 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vorg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, and for decades afterwards spectators watched attempts through the telescopes at Kleine Scheidegg, a piece of mountaineering theatre with no real equivalent anywhere else.

On screen. The Eiger's reputation made it a natural film subject, and The Eiger Sanction (1975), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as an art historian turned assassin, was shot on the face itself with Kleine Scheidegg as the production base; the climbing footage is real, and a British cameraman, David Knowles, was killed by rockfall during filming. Grindelwald has a second screen identity that has nothing to do with mountaineering. Hindi productions have used the meadows above the village, the Kleine Scheidegg saddle and the rack railway as song settings since the 1990s, and the Indian visitor traffic they generated is now a structural part of the region's business: the restaurant complex at the Jungfraujoch, the railway terminus above Grindelwald, includes an Indian kitchen trading under the name Bollywood, and Hindi is a working language at the ticket counters.

What you actually see today. The main street runs about two kilometres past hotels, sport shops and the parish church, with the Grindelwald Terminal, a large gondola base station opened in December 2020, at the western end near the Grund station. From there the Eiger Express tricable gondola lifts skiers and walkers to Eigergletscher at the foot of the face in around fifteen minutes, cutting an hour off the old approach. The Wengernalpbahn, a rack railway opened in 1893 and still the longest continuous rack line in the world, climbs from Grund over Kleine Scheidegg and down the far side to Wengen and Lauterbrunnen. From Kleine Scheidegg the Jungfrau Railway of 1912 tunnels 9.3 kilometres through the Eiger and the Monch to the Jungfraujoch at 3,454 metres, stopping at the Eismeer window in the rock.

Walking above the village. The Firstbahn gondola climbs north to 2,168 metres, where a cliff-edge walkway leads out from the station and a well-trodden path continues in about an hour to the Bachalpsee, a shallow tarn that mirrors the Schreckhorn and Finsteraarhorn when the wind drops; it is the single most photographed still water in the Bernese Alps. Two and a half hours further on lies the Faulhorn at 2,681 metres, with a mountain inn built in 1830 that is among the oldest in Europe, and beyond it the long descent to Schynige Platte. On the other side, the Pfingstegg cableway gives access to the Bäregg and the Schreckhorn hut approach above the retreating lower glacier.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Interlaken Ost take about thirty-five minutes. Cars can reach the village, and there is paid parking at the Terminal, but the mountain railways are the practical way to move around once you arrive. Hiking season runs from late June, once the higher paths clear, to late September. Ski season is roughly late December to early April across the linked Grindelwald, Wengen and Mannlichen slopes. Cloud frequently sits on the Eiger while the meadows are sunny, so it is worth keeping a flexible day in reserve for the high railway.