🇨🇭 Switzerland · Bernese Alps
Grindelwald is, for many, the most spectacular mountain village in Switzerland. It lies in a green valley at 1.034 metres of altitude, with wooden houses and meadows dotted with cows, and above it — dominating everything — the sheer, dark mass of the Eiger north face, one of the most mythical and most feared walls in world mountaineering. Around it rise the Mönch, the Wetterhorn and an amphitheatre of peaks and glaciers that takes your breath away.
It is one of the great centres of the Jungfrau region and a perfect base for experiencing the high mountains. From here you can go up to First, with its famous suspended walkway (the Cliff Walk), its zip line and its mountain scooters; to the Männlichen, with views of the three giants; to the gorge carved out by the glacier; to the hikes towards the Bachalpsee lake; and, above all, to the Jungfraujoch, the 'Top of Europe', which since 2020 you reach in record time thanks to the Eiger Express, the modern gondola leaving from the Grindelwald Terminal.
This guide covers Grindelwald with a practical eye: what to see and do, how to reach each viewpoint, which hikes are worth it and — key in this region — how to make sense of the prices of the cable cars and transport passes, which are expensive and do not always fully cover the trip up the mountain. Let's be blunt: Grindelwald is extremely expensive, but it gives you some of the most impressive alpine landscapes you can see anywhere in the world.
Grindelwald began as a community of high-mountain farmers and shepherds, in a valley where the Eiger and Wetterhorn glaciers once came down almost to the houses. For centuries it was a remote, hard place, until Romanticism and mountaineering transformed it: in the 19th century, with the 'golden age' of alpinism, the great climbers — above all British ones — came to conquer its summits, and the Wetterhorn became a symbol of those first ascents. But what gave Grindelwald world fame was its most terrible wall: the Eiger north face, the 'Nordwand', which in the 1930s claimed several tragedies — such as that of Toni Kurz in 1936 — before being climbed for the first time in 1938. The arrival of the railway and, in 1912, of the Jungfrau train, made the village a tourist capital; its retreating glaciers, documented in engravings and photographs for centuries, are today one of the best visual proofs of climate change in the Alps. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The roof of touristic Switzerland: the glacial valleys of the Bernese Oberland settled by the Walser, cradle of the golden age of alpinism and of English Romantic tourism, with Interlaken, Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen and the railway that climbs to the Jungfraujoch, the "Top of Europe".
Read the history of Bernese Alps →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For centuries, anyone arriving in Grindelwald met something that today has almost vanished: two great tongues of ice coming down from the mountains almost to the valley floor, a step away from the houses and the meadows. They were the upper and, above all, the lower Grindelwald glacier (Unterer Grindelwaldgletscher), which at their greatest advances came right up to the village pastures. The inhabitants lived alongside the ice: they feared its advances, which sometimes destroyed meadows and buildings, and looked on it as a living, threatening presence.
Grindelwald began as a high-mountain farming community, at 1.034 metres of altitude, in the valley of the Schwarze Lütschine river, which flows down towards Lake Brienz. Its people lived from alpine livestock — cows, cheese, summer pastures high up — in an isolated, hard world marked by long winters, avalanches and the whims of the glaciers. The peaks that are tourist icons today — the Eiger, the Mönch, the Wetterhorn — were for them above all dangerous, useless mountains, when not outright cursed.
Those glaciers left, without meaning to, an extraordinary scientific legacy. Because Grindelwald fascinated artists and travellers from very early on, its glaciers are among the best documented in the world: there are drawings, engravings, paintings and, later, photographs recording their position over the last four or five centuries. The Swiss painter Samuel Birmann portrayed them at their great extent around 1820, and the Bisson brothers photographed them around 1855. Thanks to that visual record we know exactly where the ice was then — and we can see, comparing with today, how far it has retreated.
In the mid-19th century, the way people looked at mountains changed completely. What for centuries had been seen as a hostile place became, for a new generation of adventurers — many of them British, from the emerging Victorian middle class — a sporting and romantic challenge. So began the so-called 'golden age of alpinism', a feverish period in which the great summits of the Alps were conquered one after another. And Grindelwald, surrounded by giants, was at the centre of that story.
A founding milestone happened right here: in 1854, the ascent of the Wetterhorn by the Englishman Alfred Wills, accompanied by local guides, is considered by many the episode that popularised and gave impetus to the golden age of alpinism. Grindelwald filled with climbers and mountain guides — local guides went from being hunters and shepherds to highly sought-after professionals — and the region's summits fell one by one. The village began to live from mountaineering and the tourism it drew.
The region's next great milestone came in 1865, though not in Grindelwald but in neighbouring Zermatt: the first ascent of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper, marked by the tragedy of the descent, in which four members of the rope team died. That catastrophe shook Europe and is usually seen as the symbolic close of the golden age. But mountaineering was already unstoppable, and in the Bernese Alps the most terrible challenge of all was still pending, one that would take almost another century to solve and that stood, literally, above Grindelwald: the Eiger north face.
The Eiger north face — the Nordwand — is a concave wall some 1.800 metres high rising directly above Grindelwald. In the 1930s it was considered the 'last great problem' of the Alps: the highest, most dangerous and most coveted wall, a mass of rotten rock, ice, avalanches and rockfall swept by storms that appear without warning. Its reputation was so dark that it was nicknamed 'Mordwand', the 'murder wall', a play on 'Nordwand'. And nobody had yet climbed it.
In July 1936, a rope team of four young men — the Germans Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser, and the Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer — attempted the ascent. Hinterstoisser managed to cross a key traverse that today bears his name, but by pulling the rope after them they lost any chance of retreating that way. Bad weather and rockfall forced them to try to descend in desperate conditions. On the retreat, the group was swept off the mountain: Hinterstoisser fell into the void, Angerer died from the impact against the wall and Rainer was crushed by the tension of the rope. Only Toni Kurz was left alive, hanging from the rope, exposed to the elements, for a whole night.
The next day a rescue team managed to get within a few metres of him through a gallery of the Jungfrau railway tunnel. Kurz, exhausted, with one hand frozen and useless, fought for hours to descend the last few metres separating him from safety. He did not make it: spent, he died in sight of his rescuers, who could not reach him. The tragedy, reported in raw detail by the press of the day, turned the Nordwand into a worldwide symbol of the line between heroism and death, and wrapped it in a dark legend that still surrounds it.
After the tragedy of 1936 and other failed and fatal attempts, the first ascent of the Eiger north face came in July 1938. Two rope teams that had started separately — the Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek on one side, and the Germans Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vörg on the other — met on the wall and decided to join forces for the hardest sections. Under the leadership of the experienced Heckmair, the team of four got past the most fearsome stretches and reached the summit on 24 July 1938, after three exhausting days on the wall, in storms and avalanches.
It was one of the greatest feats in the history of mountaineering, and it closed forever the riddle of the 'last great problem' of the Alps. The ascent was, however, marked by the political context: it came shortly after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, and Hitler's regime hurried to exploit it as a 'Germanic' propaganda feat, receiving the climbers as heroes of the Reich. It is an uncomfortable but historical nuance, and one worth not hiding when telling the story of the conquest of the wall.
One of its protagonists, Heinrich Harrer, would become world famous later for other reasons: years afterwards, having escaped from a British internment camp in India during the Second World War, he lived in Tibet and was tutor to the young Dalai Lama, an experience he recounted in his book 'Seven Years in Tibet'. The 1938 route is still today one of the great classics of world mountaineering, respected and dangerous; from Grindelwald, in good weather and with binoculars, you can still occasionally see rope teams risking their lives on the wall.
While climbers risked their lives on the walls, Swiss engineering was fighting its own battle to conquer the mountain another way: with rails. In the late 19th century, Grindelwald and its neighbouring valleys filled with mountain trains. In 1890 the line connecting the village with Interlaken arrived, opening the region to mass tourism, and shortly afterwards rack railways towards Kleine Scheidegg, at the foot of the Eiger, were added.
The boldest project was the Jungfraubahn, the Jungfrau railway. In 1893 the entrepreneur Adolf Guyer-Zeller conceived the idea of a rack railway climbing through the inside of the mountain — digging a tunnel through the Eiger and the Mönch — to a saddle at more than 3.400 metres, the Jungfraujoch. Work began in 1896 and lasted sixteen years of brutally hard drilling through the rock, with worker deaths, many of them Italian immigrants. The tunnel was completed and the train reached the Jungfraujoch in 1912, creating the highest railway station in Europe, nicknamed the 'Top of Europe'.
That railway transformed Grindelwald and the whole Jungfrau region into a first-rank tourist destination, and the village went from living off cows and mountain guides to living off tourism. Through the 20th century, cable cars, funiculars and ski lifts were added that made the area one of the great alpine centres in the world. The big recent project is the Eiger Express, the tricable gondola opened in December 2020, which climbs from the Grindelwald Terminal to the very foot of the Nordwand and drastically shortened the trip to the Jungfraujoch: a century after that pioneering train, the technological conquest of the mountain goes on.
Let's go back to the ice this story started with. The glaciers that once came down almost to Grindelwald have retreated spectacularly, and that retreat is one of the most eloquent visual proofs of climate change in the Alps. The glacier gorge (Gletscherschlucht) visited today as an attraction is precisely the rock the lower glacier exposed as it pulled back up the slope.
Thanks to centuries of drawings, engravings and photographs documenting these glaciers, scientists can reconstruct their variations with enormous precision. The data are stark: the lower Grindelwald glacier reached great maxima around 1820 and again around 1855, in the final stretch of the so-called 'Little Ice Age'; from then on a retreat began that accelerated dramatically. Between 1860 and 1930 alone its tongue pulled back hundreds of metres, and the pace has shot up in recent decades because of global warming. Comparing a 19th-century engraving with a photograph taken today from the same spot leaves you speechless: where there was a river of ice there is now bare rock and scrub.
Grindelwald lives with that process in plain sight. The retreat of the glaciers is not an abstraction from a scientific report here, but something older residents remember watching change over their own lifetimes, and that old engravings confirm with almost photographic accuracy. That is why the valley has become a kind of laboratory and open-air classroom about the climate. The village that was born fearing the advance of the ice now watches its disappearance with unease: its landscapes are still among the most impressive on the planet, but they also remind us, with the mountain right there, how fast the world is changing.