🇨🇭 Europe
The Alps at their very best: crystal-clear lakes, panoramic trains, chocolate and postcard villages.
Switzerland is the country where everything works, and that is literal: trains leave on the exact minute, a yellow postal bus reaches a village of forty people at the top of a valley, and the timetable is coordinated so that the lake boat waits for the train running late. That reliability is not a tourist detail, it is what lets you build a mountain trip with no car and no surprises, something close to impossible anywhere else in the Alps.
The country is small — you cross it end to end in about four hours by train — but it changes completely depending on where you are. The German part, with Zurich, Bern, Lucerne and Basel, is orderly and Protestant; the French part, around Lake Geneva with Geneva, Lausanne and Montreux, is more relaxed and French in feel; and Ticino, in the south, is Italian in language, food and climate, with palm trees along the lakeshore. Four official languages in a territory smaller than the Argentine province of Entre Ríos.
Let's say it up front: Switzerland is the most expensive country in Europe and probably in the world to travel in, and there is no hiding it. The flip side is that almost everything you come to see — the landscapes, the trails, the villages, the lakes — is free, and that the transport system, expensive as it is, is so good that it replaces both a car and organised tours. With a transport pass and mountain hostels for accommodation, the trip comes down a fair bit from what you fear.
The local currency is the Swiss franc (CHF). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for CHF →Zurich (ZRH), Geneva (GVA) and Basel (BSL) all have a train station inside the airport, with services to the centre every few minutes. Swiss public transport is the most integrated in the world: trains, yellow postal buses, lake boats and funiculars are coordinated to the minute on a single timetable, so you can reach mountain villages without a car and without stress. The Swiss Travel Pass covers all of that plus museums, and it pays off as soon as you do two or three long journeys. The panoramic trains — the Glacier Express between Zermatt and St. Moritz, the Bernina Express towards Italy — need a separate reservation. Everything is expensive, but the system works so well that a car almost never makes sense.
Summer, from June to September, is hiking season and the best bet for a first trip: the high trails are open, every cable car and mountain train is running, the alpine passes are clear and you can swim in the lakes. July and August bring the most people and the highest prices; June and September give you almost the same thing with far more calm, though in early June there can still be snow on trails above two thousand metres.
Winter, from December to March, is the other high season and it transforms the country: skiing in every region, Christmas markets in December and alpine villages at their postcard best. Prices in the resorts jump a lot at Christmas, New Year and in February. The shoulder seasons — November and mid-April to May — are the cheapest, but be aware that in those months many cable cars, mountain hotels and restaurants close for maintenance between one season and the next, so check before you lock in an itinerary.
Swiss cooking is mountain and winter food, designed for after a day outdoors. Cheese fondue, shared by dipping bread into the common pot, and raclette, where melted cheese is scraped over potatoes and pickles, are the two signature dishes and both come from the French-speaking part. In the German-speaking area there is Rösti, a golden grated-potato cake, and Zürcher Geschnetzeltes, strips of veal in cream. In Ticino you eat proper Italian: risotto, polenta and cured meats, served in grotti, rustic stone restaurants.
Swiss chocolate has a well-earned reputation and the milk version was invented here, as was the technique that gives chocolate its melting texture; it is worth buying at neighbourhood chocolate shops and not only from the airport brands. Cheese goes far beyond holey Emmental: Gruyère, Appenzeller and Sbrinz are better and you can buy them at any market. Two practical habits: the water from public fountains in the cities is drinkable unless a sign says otherwise, and filling your bottle there saves real money; and the tip is included in the price by law, so you round up if you want but no percentage is expected.
Switzerland is one of the safest countries in the world and crime is not a traveller's concern beyond pickpockets in the big stations in Zurich, Geneva and Basel. You can walk at night in any city without a problem. The general emergency number is 112, and there are two numbers worth writing down if you are heading into the mountains: 144 for medical emergencies and 1414 for Rega, the Swiss air rescue service, the one that comes for you by helicopter if something happens at altitude.
The health system is excellent and among the most expensive on the planet, so travel insurance is not negotiable; for the Schengen visa you are required to have cover of at least thirty thousand euros, and it is worth checking specifically that it covers mountain rescue and high-altitude sports, which many policies exclude and which in Switzerland is exactly what you may end up needing. Tap water is excellent. The country's real risk is alpine: the weather changes in minutes, you have to check the forecast before every walk, respect the trail waymarking — white and red is mountain, white-blue-white is alpine and demands experience — and never leave the marked pistes when skiing.
Switzerland is the most expensive country in Europe to travel in and it is worth planning with that in mind. As a rough guide, and making clear that there is no official source for these figures, a dorm bed in a hostel usually runs from forty to seventy francs, a mid-range hotel from a hundred and sixty to two hundred and fifty, a main course in a simple restaurant from twenty-five to forty and a coffee from four to six. On top of that come transport and the mountain cable cars, which are a big and constant expense: going up to Jungfraujoch or the Gornergrat costs what a domestic flight costs in another country.
There are three levers that really change the arithmetic. The first is transport: if you are going to be moving for several days, do the maths on the Swiss Travel Pass, which covers trains, buses, boats and many museums, and which pays for itself with two or three long journeys a day; there is also the Half Fare Card, which gives you half price on everything. The second is eating from the supermarket: Coop and Migros branches sell prepared food, and filling your bottle at public fountains is free. The third is sleeping in mountain hostels and in Swiss Alpine Club huts, which cost a fraction of a hotel and are in better places. And most important of all: what you come to see — trails, villages, lakes, viewpoints you walk up to — costs nothing.
Punctuality is not a virtue here but a baseline expectation: turning up late to an appointment, even an informal one, is read as disrespect, and trains leave on the exact minute without waiting for anyone. Order and quiet are taken seriously: buildings have written rules about what hours you can make noise, on Sundays nobody mows the lawn or does DIY, and train carriages have quiet zones that people actually respect. Rubbish is separated strictly and in several cities you have to use official bags with the fee included. Swiss people are reserved and formal with strangers, but very correct and helpful if you ask.
The country has four official languages — German, French, Italian and Romansh — and that division is real: you cross from one region to another and the language on the signs changes, along with the food and even the humour. The German spoken in the street is Swiss German, quite different from standard German, so anyone who studied German is in for a surprise. In the mountains there is a custom worth adopting: you greet everyone you pass on a trail, without exception. And Swiss politics has a quirk that explains a lot about the country's character: people vote in referendums several times a year on almost everything, so decisions are taken slowly and by consensus.
The history of Switzerland is the history of a country that should not exist according to any of the rules we normally use to explain nations: it has no common language (it speaks four), no single ethnic origin, no shared religion, not even a natural border to keep it apart. Switzerland is, instead, a political will sustained for more than seven centuries: that of a handful of peasant communities in the heart of the Alps who in 1291 swore to help one another against the lords who wanted to rule them, and who from that pact went on adding valleys, cities and territories until they formed the oldest and most stable confederation on the planet. Along the way they invented two things they are still known for: the best infantry soldiers in Renaissance Europe and, centuries later, neutrality as a reason of state.
Travelling through Switzerland means moving through all those layers at once: the Helvetii whom Julius Caesar pushed back into their mountains, the invisible language border left by the Alemanni and the Burgundians that still separates German Switzerland from French Switzerland, the Federal Charter of 1291 and the legend of William Tell that was built long afterwards, the impossible victories of peasants with pikes against the knights of the Habsburgs, Zwingli's Reformation in Zurich and Calvin's Geneva, the Sonderbund civil war that in 1847 founded the modern country, the Red Cross born in Geneva, Nazi gold and the Jewish refugees turned away at the border, women's suffrage that did not arrive until 1971, banking secrecy and its end. A small, prosperous and seemingly quiet country whose history, looked at closely, is anything but simple.
Read the full history of Switzerland →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
