Interlaken

Where it sits. Interlaken is built on the Bodeli, the flat two-kilometre isthmus of gravel and silt that the Lutschine and the Lombach dumped between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, splitting what was once a single body of water into two separate lakes. The Aare crosses the town from east to west at 567 metres above sea level, slow and glacier-green, and the streets spread either side of it in the canton of Berne. To the north the wooded wall of the Harder rises almost vertically out of the rooftops; to the south the low Rugen ridge parts just wide enough to frame the Jungfrau, 4,158 metres high and some twenty kilometres away, in a gap that looks deliberately cut for the purpose. That framed view is why the town exists in its present form.

From Augustinian monastery to alpine resort. The name is medieval Latin, inter lacus, between the lakes, and it belonged first to an Augustinian house founded around 1130 on the north bank of the Aare. Berne dissolved it at the Reformation in 1528 and converted the cloister into an administrative seat; the buildings still stand behind the Schlosskirche and still hold cantonal offices. Tourism arrived with the Romantics. Byron passed through in 1816, Mendelssohn sketched here, and by the 1850s the Hoheweg had been laid out as a formal promenade with the Kursaal of 1859 at one end and a line of grand hotels along it, the Victoria-Jungfrau among them from 1865. The decision that shaped the modern town came in 1864, when a consortium of owners bought the Hohematte meadow and bound themselves never to build on it.

Hindi cinema's Swiss capital. From the late 1980s the Bernese Oberland became the default romantic landscape of Bombay film-making, and Yash Chopra was the director who put it there. Chandni (1989) and Darr (1993) carry long Swiss sequences, and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which Chopra produced and his son Aditya Chopra directed, sent a whole generation of Indian travellers looking for the meadows, level crossings and station platforms it used. Switzerland Tourism eventually made the relationship official and marketed the country to India through Chopra's name. After his death in 2012 a bronze statue of him was unveiled in Interlaken in 2016; it stands near the Hoheweg with the Jungfrau behind it, one of very few European monuments to a foreign film director, and tour groups stop at it daily.

What you actually see today. The Hohematte is the centrepiece: fourteen hectares of unbuilt grass in the middle of a resort town, used as the region's main paragliding landing field, so on any settled afternoon canopies drop in every few minutes from Beatenberg with the peaks behind them. The Hoheweg runs along its northern edge past the Kursaal's planted flower clock and the casino gardens. Interlaken has two railway stations, West and Ost, about a kilometre and a half apart. Ost is the one that matters: the junction where the Berner Oberland-Bahn splits for Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald and where the Brunig line climbs away towards Lucerne. Lake steamers leave from piers beside each station, and the canalised Aare between them fills in summer with rented pedalos and, at the weir, with river surfers.

Going up from here. Interlaken is a base rather than a destination in itself, and the ascents start in the town. The Harder Kulm funicular, running since 1908 on gradients above sixty per cent, lifts you to 1,322 metres in about ten minutes to a restaurant and the Zwei-Seen-Steg, a viewing platform cantilevered out over the drop with Thun on one side and Brienz on the other. The little Heimwehfluh funicular of 1906 climbs the opposite side to a model railway and a toboggan run. From Wilderswil, one stop south, the Schynige Platte rack railway of 1893 grinds up to 1,967 metres and an alpine botanical garden holding several hundred species of mountain plants.

Getting there and timing. Trains run direct from Berne in about fifty minutes, from Lucerne in roughly two hours over the Brunig pass, and from Zurich airport in about two and a quarter hours; a regional or national rail pass covers most of the onward mountain lines at a reduction. High summer, from late June to early September, brings both the best hiking weather and the heaviest crowds along the Hoheweg. Late spring and October are calmer, with lower room rates and clearer air. The Jungfrau view is sharpest in the first hours after sunrise, before valley haze builds. Every few years the town hosts the Unspunnenfest, a traditional festival of alphorn, wrestling and stone-throwing that fills the Hohematte.