Before there was a Switzerland there were the Helvetii, a confederation of Celtic tribes that occupied much of the plateau between the Jura and the Alps. Their moment in world history came in 58 BC when — as Julius Caesar himself recounts at the opening of The Gallic War — they decided to abandon their territory en masse and migrate west into Gaul, burning their own villages so there could be no turning back. Caesar intercepted and defeated them at the battle of Bibracte, and forced the survivors to return to their lands so they would act as a buffer against the Germanic peoples. Under the Empire the region was thoroughly Romanised: Aventicum (present-day Avenches) was the capital of Roman Helvetia, with a forum, a theatre and an amphitheatre, and cities such as Augusta Raurica, near Basel, or Genava (Geneva) prospered for centuries beside the roads linking Italy with the Rhine.
The end of the Roman world brought the Germanic peoples, and with them a division that would mark Switzerland forever. To the north and east the Alemanni settled and imposed their Germanic language; to the west, around Lake Geneva and the Rhône valley, the Burgundians settled and adopted the vulgar Latin from which French would be born. That double settlement drew, with nobody planning it, the language border that still crosses the country today: the so-called Röstigraben, the invisible line separating German-speaking Switzerland from French-speaking Switzerland. It is not a political border or a river: it is the trace, more than fifteen hundred years later, of where one people stopped and another began.
During the Early Middle Ages, Swiss territory was divided among kingdoms and duchies — the kingdom of Burgundy, the duchy of Swabia — and ended up part of the Holy Roman Empire. On that feudal mosaic local dynasties, powerful monasteries and free cities grew, and above all one family that aspired to dominate it all from its castle on the Aare: the Habsburgs. Resistance to that family would be, quite literally, Switzerland's birth certificate.
Switzerland's founding document is the Federal Charter (Bundesbrief), a Latin parchment signed in early August 1291 by the rural communities of three alpine valleys around Lake Lucerne: Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (the so-called Waldstätten, the forest cantons). In it, the inhabitants swore mutual assistance against anyone who tried to subject them by force, and undertook to settle their disputes among themselves. The pact was signed a few weeks after the death, on 15 July 1291, of Emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg, at a moment of uncertainty. From that name, Schwyz, the name of the whole country would eventually derive: Schweiz, Suisse, Svizzera, Switzerland. And it was because of the date of that document that modern Switzerland chose, back in the 19th century, to celebrate its national day on 1 August.
Around that pact the great patriotic story was later woven: the Rütli oath, the meadow above the lake where, according to tradition, three men representing the three valleys sealed the alliance in secret; and above all the figure of William Tell, the crossbowman from Uri who refuses to salute the hat of the bailiff Gessler, is forced to shoot an apple off his own son's head, and ends up killing the tyrant and sparking the rebellion. It is worth saying plainly: William Tell is a legend, not a historical fact. There is not a single contemporary document mentioning him or the bailiff Gessler; the archives of the period contain no trace of either.
The story appears for the first time almost two centuries after the events it claims to narrate, around 1470-1474, in the White Book of Sarnen (Weisses Buch von Sarnen), and spreads through the Swiss chronicles of the 16th century. The apple-shot motif, moreover, is a folk topos that reappears in many cultures — the archer Toko in Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, Egil in the Icelandic sagas, William of Cloudesley in England — which reinforces the idea that this is a legendary construction and not a chronicle. Why and when did Tell become a national hero? Because a confederation with no king and no dynasty needed an origin myth, and the resistance of the free man against the foreign lord fitted perfectly; the myth grew in the 16th century, became omnipresent with the building of the nation state in the 19th century and was fixed forever by Friedrich Schiller's drama William Tell (1804) and Rossini's opera (1829). The Swiss themselves usually admit without difficulty that Tell never existed; that has not cost him an ounce of power as a symbol.
The pact of 1291 would have been just one more local agreement had the confederates not proved, with weapons, that they could defend themselves alone. The first test came on 15 November 1315 at Morgarten, a defile between Lake Ägeri and a wooded slope, where the men of Schwyz ambushed the cavalry of Duke Leopold I of Austria. Trapped in the narrow pass, unable to manoeuvre, the Habsburg knights were crushed by avalanches of logs and stones and by the peasants coming down the mountain with halberds. It was a humiliation for the leading feudal power in the region and a demonstration that infantry made up of free men, well placed on the ground, could defeat the flower of the mounted nobility. Shortly after the battle, at Brunnen, the three cantons renewed and expanded their alliance.
The second great victory, and the most celebrated, was the battle of Sempach, on 9 July 1386. There Duke Leopold III of Austria, at the head of a powerful army of knights, himself fell in combat against the confederates. Tradition links it to the figure — also legendary — of Arnold von Winkelried, the hero from Unterwalden who is said to have thrown himself onto the enemy spears, clutching them to his chest to open a gap in the Austrian formation and let his companions through. Two years later, in 1388, another victory at Näfels cemented Swiss military prestige.
These victories had a snowball effect. Cities and territories that saw in the Confederation protection against the Habsburgs and a guarantee of their liberties joined the core of three cantons: Lucerne (1332), Zurich (1351), Glarus and Zug (1352) and Bern (1353) formed the Confederation of Eight Cantons (Acht Orte). Each new member joined by its own treaty, so Switzerland grew not as a state planned from above but as a network of overlapping alliances between communities that wanted to govern themselves.
The military reputation earned against the Habsburgs made the Swiss, during the 15th and 16th centuries, the most sought-after soldiers in Europe. Their tight formations of pikemen and halberdiers — the Reisläufer — could stop and break cavalry charges and move as a single block bristling with steel points. No self-respecting prince wanted to go to war without them. The result was a mass export of men: the alpine valleys were poor, with little land and many hands, and the Confederation found in foreign mercenary service (the Solddienst) an enormous source of income, at the cost of thousands of young men dying in other people's wars, sometimes facing each other on opposite sides. The cantons signed capitulations with kings of France, popes and Italian cities, and the pensions and bribes that came with those contracts corrupted much of the political life of the period.
One famous vestige of that whole tradition survives today: the Pontifical Swiss Guard, the corps that protects the pope at the Vatican. It was founded by Pope Julius II in 1506 and is one of the oldest military units still in service in the world. Its most glorious and most tragic day was 6 May 1527, during the Sack of Rome by the troops of Emperor Charles V: most of the Swiss guards died defending Pope Clement VII so he could flee along the passageway to Castel Sant'Angelo. To this day new guards are sworn in every 6 May in memory of that sacrifice.
Over time, mercenary service went from a source of pride to a problem. After centuries of bloodletting, modern Switzerland ended up banning military service in foreign armies: the federal constitution and the laws of the 19th and 20th centuries prohibited it completely, with a single exception tolerated for its symbolic and religious character — precisely the Vatican's Swiss Guard — which is why it is still today the last Swiss army in the service of a foreign power.
At the height of its military power, in the early 16th century, the Confederation did not stop at renting out soldiers: it intervened in the Italian Wars as a power in its own right, came to control the Duchy of Milan and to make and unmake dukes. It looked as if Switzerland might become a great warrior state in the heart of Europe. That dream collapsed over two days in September 1515 at Marignano (today Melegnano), south of Milan. There, the roughly 20.000 Swiss mercenaries in the service of the Duke of Milan smashed against the army of the young King Francis I of France, backed by powerful artillery and Venetian cavalry. The Swiss pikes, unbeatable against other pikemen, were at the mercy of the French cannon, which tore holes in their ranks from a distance. The battle was a slaughter, with thousands of Swiss dead, and ended in unmitigated defeat.
Marignano was one of those dates that change the mindset of a people. The following year, in 1516, the Confederation signed the Perpetual Peace with France, and from then on the Swiss renounced, as a political body, adventures of conquest and taking sides in Europe's great wars. They went on renting regiments to one side and the other — the mercenary business lasted centuries — but the Confederation as such stopped playing power politics and turned in on itself.
That withdrawal is the distant origin of Swiss neutrality, which today is almost a synonym for the country. It was not born of an abstract pacifist ideal but of a bitter lesson learned on the battlefield and, above all, of an internal necessity: a confederation divided between Catholic and Protestant cantons, German-, French- and Italian-speaking, could only hold together if it did not let itself be dragged into other people's wars. Any external alignment threatened to split Switzerland itself in two. Neutrality was, before it was a doctrine, an instrument of survival.
Switzerland was one of the great laboratories of the Protestant Reformation, and for that very reason it nearly broke apart from within. In Zurich, the priest Huldrych Zwingli began around 1519 to preach against the abuses of the Church, the cult of images, celibacy and — in a very Swiss touch — against the mercenary business and foreign pensions. With the backing of the city government, Zurich broke with Rome and turned Protestant. His reform spread to Bern, Basel and other cities. In Geneva, somewhat later, the Frenchman John Calvin (Jean Calvin) built from 1536 a religious republic so rigorous and so influential that the city earned the nickname "the Protestant Rome", from which Calvinism radiated out to France, the Netherlands, Scotland and beyond.
But the cantonal countryside stayed loyal to the old faith: the rural cantons of the centre — the very ones of the original pact — remained Catholic. The Confederation was split in two, and the tension exploded into war. In the Kappel wars, Zwingli himself died on the battlefield on 11 October 1531, in the second of them; his body was quartered by the Catholic victors. The peace that followed did not resolve the conflict: it froze it. A forced coexistence was established in which each canton kept its religion and the common territories were shared out under complicated rules, a pioneering model of confessional coexistence that nonetheless left open wounds.
That religious fracture did not cause another great war until well into the 17th and 18th centuries, with the Villmergen wars: the first (1656) was won by the Catholic cantons, the second (1712) by the Protestants, who reversed the balance of power inside the Confederation. For almost three centuries Swiss domestic politics was dominated by this fault line between Catholics and Reformed, layered on top of the linguistic one and the one separating cities from rural cantons. That such a divided country did not dissolve is perhaps the greatest achievement of its whole history.
Between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Confederation kept growing until it reached the shape it would keep for almost three centuries: that of the Thirteen Cantons (Dreizehn Orte). Fribourg and Solothurn (1481), Basel and Schaffhausen (1501) and finally Appenzell (1513) joined the original eight. Alongside these thirteen full members there was a complex periphery of associated territories (such as Geneva, St Gallen or the Grisons) and, above all, subject lands or common bailiwicks (Gemeine Herrschaften), governed jointly by several cantons through bailiffs, with no voice of their own: that is how the present-day cantons of Vaud, Thurgau, Aargau and Ticino were administered. The "old Confederation" was not a democracy but a mosaic of urban republics ruled by patriciates and of rural communities, each with its privileges and its subjects.
During the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which devastated neighbouring Germany, the Confederation managed to stay out of it thanks to the neutrality born after Marignano, and became an island of relative peace and prosperity in the middle of a continent in flames. That isolation had a historic reward: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the war, the independence of the Swiss Confederation from the Holy Roman Empire was formally recognised. The negotiation was led by the burgomaster of Basel, Johann Rudolf Wettstein. Switzerland, which had in fact been governing itself for generations, was at last legally released from the Empire.
The next century and a half, that of the Swiss Ancien Régime, was a period of conservative stability and also of growing inequality. Power concentrated in closed urban oligarchies — in Bern, Zurich, Lucerne or Geneva a few families monopolised government — while the subject lands and the peasants were left out of every decision. At the same time, cities such as Geneva, Zurich and Basel were becoming centres of the Enlightenment, of banking and of nascent industry. That contradiction between an increasingly enlightened society and increasingly rigid institutions would blow the building apart when the revolutionary storm arrived from France.
In 1798 the storm of the French Revolution reached Switzerland in the form of an invasion. French troops occupied the country, tore down the old patrician governments and proclaimed the Helvetic Republic, a unitary, centralised state copied from the French model, which abolished cantonal privileges at a stroke, freed the subject lands and proclaimed the equality of all citizens. On paper it was an enormous advance; in practice it was a failure. A country made up of communities used to governing themselves would not tolerate everything being decided from a capital, and the Helvetic Republic sank into coups, revolts and bankruptcy, while Switzerland also became a battlefield between French, Austrian and Russian armies (the battles of Zurich in 1799).
Faced with the chaos, Napoleon Bonaparte himself stepped in as arbiter. On 19 February 1803 he issued the Act of Mediation, which dissolved the failed unitary republic and restored a confederation of cantons with wide autonomy, but now without subjects: the former subject territories — Aargau, Thurgau, St Gallen, the Grisons, Vaud and Ticino — became full cantons, equal to the rest. Switzerland thus went from thirteen to nineteen cantons. During the Napoleonic years it was also tied to France as an ally and had to supply troops for its campaigns.
Napoleon's fall opened the chapter of the Restoration. The Congress of Vienna of 1815 redrew Europe and, as far as Switzerland was concerned, took two decisive steps: it brought three new cantons into the Confederation — Valais, Geneva and Neuchâtel — completing the twenty-two it would have for almost the whole 19th century, and, above all, it formally recognised and guaranteed Switzerland's perpetual neutrality. For the first time, neutrality stopped being a mere internal practice and became a status recognised by the great European powers. In exchange, the Restoration handed power back to the old patriciates in many cantons, which reopened the old fight between liberals and conservatives that would explode, three decades later, into civil war.
The modern country was born of a short but decisive civil war. During the first half of the 19th century, liberals and radicals — mostly Protestant and urban — wanted to turn the weak confederation of states into a genuine federal state, with a central government, a unified economy and democratic constitutions in the cantons. The Catholic conservatives, by contrast, defended the full sovereignty of each canton and the rights of the Church. In 1845, seven Catholic and conservative cantons — Lucerne, Fribourg, Valais, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Zug — formed a separate alliance, the Sonderbund ("separate league"), to defend their interests, which the liberal majority in the Diet regarded as a violation of the confederal pact.
In 1847 the Diet ordered the Sonderbund dissolved; the seven cantons refused and took up arms. The Sonderbund war broke out in November 1847 and was extraordinarily short and not very bloody: the federal army, some 100.000 men under General Guillaume-Henri Dufour, defeated the separatist forces in barely three weeks, with around a hundred dead in total. Dufour, who years later would be one of the founders of the Red Cross, gave express orders to treat prisoners and wounded enemies humanely and to protect the civilian population: it was a civil war without reprisals, something almost unique in European history.
The liberal victory made it possible to refound the country. The federal Constitution of 1848 turned the old confederation of states into a modern federal state, with a central government (the Federal Council, a collegiate executive of seven members), a bicameral parliament inspired by the American model — a National Council elected by population and a Council of States representing the cantons —, a single currency and market, and Bern as the federal city. The cantons kept very wide powers, so Switzerland managed to unite without ceasing to be diverse. That constitution, thoroughly revised in 1874 and in 1999, is the basis of today's Swiss state: one of the few cases in which a civil war gave rise, almost immediately, to a stable and lasting democracy.
Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world with four national languages, and that multilingualism is central to understanding how it works. German — or rather Swiss German, a set of dialects (Schwyzerdütsch) very different from standard German — is spoken by around 62% of the population, above all in the centre, the north and the east. French, at about 23%, dominates the west (la Suisse romande): Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, the Jura. Italian, close to 8%, is the language of the south, of the canton of Ticino and of some valleys in the Grisons. And Romansh (rumantsch), spoken by less than 1% of the population in the valleys of the Grisons, is a Romance language descended directly from Latin, a thousand-year-old survivor in the mountains.
Romansh was recognised as the fourth national language in a referendum on 20 February 1938, approved by more than 91% of voters. It was no coincidence: with fascism on the rise, Mussolini's Italy was claiming Ticino and the Grisons as "ethnically Italian" lands, and Switzerland responded by asserting its identity as a deliberately multilingual nation, a "nation by will" (Willensnation) defined not by blood or by language but by the decision to live together. It was part of the country's so-called "spiritual defence" against the neighbouring dictatorships. German, French and Italian are full official languages of the Confederation; Romansh is one only partially, for dealings with those who speak it.
The other pillar of Swiss political identity is direct democracy, probably the most developed on the planet. Citizens do not just elect representatives: they vote directly on laws several times a year. Through the referendum they can challenge laws already passed by parliament, and through the popular initiative they can propose changes to the Constitution itself if they gather 100.000 signatures. In some rural cantons — Appenzell Innerrhoden, Glarus — the Landsgemeinde even survives, the open-air assembly in which citizens vote by show of hands in a square. This system makes Swiss politics slow, cautious and consensual, and explains many of its peculiarities, including — as we will see — the astonishing delay in recognising women's right to vote.
Switzerland came through both world wars without entering combat, protected by its neutrality, its geography as an alpine fortress (the "National Redoubt") and a general mobilisation that put hundreds of thousands of men on a war footing. Completely surrounded by the Axis powers between 1940 and 1944, it kept its independence through a combination of military deterrence and economic concessions to the Third Reich. And it is here, in those concessions, that Swiss history enters its greyest areas, long kept quiet and only studied in depth from the 1990s onwards.
The first dark chapter is the gold. During the war the Swiss National Bank bought large quantities of gold from the German Reichsbank, and part of that gold was looted: bullion stolen from the central banks of occupied countries and, to some extent, gold taken from the victims of the Holocaust. In exchange, the convertible Swiss franc allowed Germany to buy abroad the raw materials it needed. The second chapter, even more painful, is the refugees. Over the course of the war Switzerland took in hundreds of thousands of people, but it also turned away at its border tens of thousands of persecuted people, many of them Jewish, in many cases knowing what it was sending them back to. As early as 1938 the Swiss authorities themselves had asked Germany to stamp a "J" in the passports of German Jews so that they could be identified and refused. The phrase with which a federal councillor justified the closure — "the boat is full" (das Boot ist voll) — has remained the symbol of that policy.
These facts were rigorously investigated by the Independent Commission of Experts, known as the Bergier Commission after its chairman, the historian Jean-François Bergier, created by the Swiss parliament in 1996 and whose final report was published in 2002. The commission, made up of Swiss and foreign historians, documented the transactions in Nazi gold, the volume of Jewish assets in Swiss banks and, above all, concluded that Switzerland turned away numerous refugees — the expulsions estimated at around 20.000 people or more — and that antisemitism among part of the authorities weighed decisively in that policy, not only food shortages or military pressure. The report avoided both easy condemnation and whitewashing: it acknowledged that neutrality saved the country and sheltered many people, but also that there was economic complicity with the Nazi regime and decisions that cost lives. Its conclusions are still debated by historians, but they are today the soundest and most honest basis for understanding Switzerland's real role in those years.
The country we associate today with prosperity, banking and international organisations took its final shape in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1863 a Genevan, Henri Dunant, horrified by the slaughter of the wounded he had witnessed at the battle of Solferino (1859), pushed for the creation in Geneva of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose emblem — a red cross on a white background — is the Swiss flag with the colours reversed. The following year, in 1864, the Swiss government sponsored the signing of the first Geneva Convention, the cornerstone of humanitarian law. From that came "international Geneva": seat of the League of Nations after the First World War and today of the European office of the UN, the WHO, the WTO, UNHCR and dozens of other bodies, precisely thanks to the credibility of Swiss neutrality.
That same discretion fed the country's other great industry: banking. Banking secrecy, written into law in 1934, made Switzerland a refuge for capital from half the world and one of the most powerful financial centres on the planet. That model went into crisis in the 21st century: in 2009 the bank UBS had to pay a multimillion-dollar fine to the United States and reveal the names of tax-evading clients; Switzerland ended up signing up to the American FATCA law and, above all, adopting in 2017 the automatic exchange of tax information with more than a hundred countries, which began to apply in 2018. The old banking secrecy for foreign clients, a symbol of Switzerland for almost a century, was thus dismantled in practice.
Two more traits define today's Switzerland. The first is the astonishing delay in women's rights: female suffrage was not approved at federal level until a referendum on 7 February 1971 — an anomaly in Western Europe — and it took until 1990 for the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, to admit women's votes in cantonal affairs, and only because the Federal Supreme Court imposed it by ruling on 27 November 1990, against the express will of its all-male assembly. The second is its relationship with Europe: Switzerland is not a member of the European Union — it even rejected joining the European Economic Area in a referendum on 6 December 1992 — and deals with Brussels through a dense network of bilateral agreements; it joined the UN only in 2002, after another referendum. Prosperous, multilingual, democratic to an extreme and jealous of its independence, contemporary Switzerland remains faithful to the old formula that has held it together since 1291: governing itself without letting anyone drag it along.
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The Bernese Alps, or Bernese Oberland (Berner Oberland), are the mountainous part of the canton of Bern: a world of deep valleys, lakes and snowy peaks dominated by the mythical trio of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. For centuries it was a region of mountain shepherds and farmers, whose communities lived off alpine livestock, cheese and traffic over the passes. The region was part of the wide domain of the city of Bern, which administered it from the lowlands.
Much of the Swiss high mountains was settled in the Middle Ages by the Walser, a German-speaking people originally from Valais (hence their name) who between the 12th and 14th centuries migrated over the high alpine passes and founded villages in extremely high, isolated places in the Alps, from the Oberland itself to the Grisons, Ticino, northern Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein. The Walser were experts at surviving at altitude, and they carried their dialect and customs with them, which in some remote valleys still endure today.
That alpine Switzerland, poor and remote, barely changed for centuries. Its great transformation came not from farming or from war but from a new idea: that mountains, until then feared as hostile places, could be beautiful and worth visiting. That change of gaze, born with Romanticism, turned the Bernese Oberland into one of the first tourist destinations in history and into the stage for the sporting conquest of the Alps.
In the mid-19th century the Alps became the great playing field of a new European passion: mountaineering. The period from 1854 to 1865 is known as the "golden age of alpinism", a race in which climbers — mostly British, accompanied by local Swiss guides — conquered, one after another, the great virgin summits of the Alps. The impulse came largely from England, where in 1857 the Alpine Club, the first mountaineering club in the world, was founded.
The Bernese Alps were at the centre of that epic. Summits such as the Jungfrau (first climbed as early as 1811 by the Meyer brothers), the Mönch and the Finsteraarhorn were climbed in those decades, and the fearsome Eiger, with its north face, would become in the 20th century the greatest challenge in alpine mountaineering, the scene of famous tragedies and feats. The guides of the Oberland valleys — from Grindelwald, from Lauterbrunnen — went from being peasants to being indispensable professionals, and their knowledge of the terrain made the great ascents possible.
The golden age ended abruptly in 1865 with the first ascent of the Matterhorn, in neighbouring Valais, and the tragedy that cost four lives on the descent. From then on almost all the great summits had been conquered, and mountaineering entered a different phase, more technical and sporting. But the momentum was already unstoppable: the mountains had become a destination, and the pioneering climbers were followed by a tide of travellers who only wanted to look at them.
Before anyone climbed them, the mountains of the Oberland were already drawing Romantic travellers. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, poets, painters and writers — above all British and German — began to travel the Swiss Alps in search of the "sublime": the thrill of grand, wild nature. The Lauterbrunnen valley, with its waterfalls dropping from vertical walls, inspired Goethe and served as the setting for Lord Byron's Manfred; the composer Mendelssohn and many others left testimony of their fascination with these landscapes.
Interlaken, the town between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz (hence its name, "between lakes"), became the heart of that emerging tourism. From its grand avenue, the Höheweg, travellers looked out at the snow-covered Jungfrau in the distance, and around it the great Belle Époque hotels flourished, with their stately façades, gardens and luxury service. The British in particular made Switzerland their favourite destination: agencies like Thomas Cook's organised group trips, and the Alps filled with excursionists carrying a guide, a walking stick and a watercolour notebook.
That was, in the fullest sense, the invention of modern mountain tourism. Rack railways, funiculars and viewpoints were built to carry visitors to places that had been unreachable: the Rigi, the Schilthorn, the Harder Kulm above Interlaken. The landscape stopped being an obstacle and became a product, and the poor valleys of the Oberland found in the outsider a source of wealth that transformed their economy forever. The image of Switzerland the world holds today — snowy peaks, green meadows, cows and chalets — was largely forged in these valleys, for the consumption of those first tourists.
The work that crowned that drive to carry travellers up to the summits was the Jungfrau Railway (Jungfraubahn), one of the engineering feats of the early 20th century. The idea came from the Zurich industrialist Adolf Guyer-Zeller, who in 1893 conceived a train that would climb through the inside of the mountain to a saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, the Jungfraujoch, at 3.454 metres of altitude. Work began in 1896 and was brutally hard: a long tunnel had to be bored through the rock of the Eiger and the Mönch in extreme conditions, with explosions, accidents and years of delay. Guyer-Zeller died in 1899 without seeing his work finished.
The tunnel was completed on 21 February 1912 and the Jungfraujoch station opened on 1 August of that year. Since then the rack railway sets off from the Interlaken area, climbs via Lauterbrunnen or Grindelwald to Kleine Scheidegg station, and from there goes into the mountain until it emerges at the Jungfraujoch, marketed as the "Top of Europe": it holds the highest railway station in Europe, a scientific observatory (the Sphinx), restaurants, viewpoints and an ice palace carved into the Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps.
More than a century later, the Jungfrau railway is still one of Switzerland's great attractions, able to take any visitor in a few hours from the green valleys to the world of eternal snows of the high mountains. Together with the surrounding Jungfrau-Aletsch region, declared a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site, it represents the culmination of that long transformation by which the Bernese Alps went from being a poor, feared corner to becoming one of the most admired and most visited landscapes on the planet.
At the foot of the great summits open the two emblematic valleys of the Oberland. Lauterbrunnen is boxed in between vertical rock walls almost a thousand metres high, down which seventy-two waterfalls plunge: the most famous, the Staubbach, falls in a veil of water almost 300 metres long and was precisely the one that impressed Goethe and the Romantic travellers. The valley, with its row of farms and its church beneath the cliffs, is one of the most reproduced images of the Alps and the starting point for Wengen, Mürren and the Schilthorn.
Grindelwald, in the neighbouring valley, stretches out at the foot of the Eiger north face, the most feared in the Alps. An old village of farmers and mountain guides, it was one of the first centres of alpinism and tourism in the Oberland, with its glaciers that once came almost down to the houses — today in sharp retreat because of climate change — and its summits as a backdrop. From Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen the mountain trains leave for Kleine Scheidegg and the Jungfraujoch.
Today these valleys live almost entirely from tourism, in summer from hiking and the landscape, in winter from skiing in the great Jungfrau ski area. They combine modern cable car and train infrastructure with the living memory of the guides, the shepherds and the first hoteliers who made these corners the heart of touristic Switzerland. Few places sum up better that double Switzerland — the ancestral one of the mountains and the one invented for the traveller — than the twin valleys of the Jungfrau.
Northern Switzerland is organised around the Mittelland, the rolling plateau that stretches between the Jura massif and the Alps, from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance. It is the most populated and richest part of Switzerland: this is where the big cities, industry, universities and most of the population are concentrated. It is also the core of German-speaking Switzerland, heir to the Alemanni who settled it after the end of Rome, where people speak not standard German but Swiss German (Schwyzerdütsch), a range of dialects the Swiss use daily and which is an essential part of their identity.
Unlike the alpine valleys of the original pact, the northern cities — Zurich, Bern, Basel, Lucerne, Schaffhausen — were urban republics governed by guilds and patriciates, with walls, cathedrals, universities and intense commercial life. They joined the Confederation between the 14th and 16th centuries, and brought the economic and cultural weight that balanced the peasant world of the founding cantons. Their rivalry and their cooperation with those rural cantons shaped much of Swiss history.
Many of the country's great episodes were decided in these cities: the Reformation caught fire in Zurich, Bern and Basel; humanism flourished beside the Rhine; and from here, in the 19th century, came the liberal impulses that created the modern federal state, with Bern as capital. Travelling through northern Switzerland means visiting, one after another, the capitals of that old urban Switzerland that acted as a counterweight to the Switzerland of the mountains.
Zurich, on the shores of its lake and the river Limmat, is today the largest city in Switzerland and one of the world's financial capitals, but its decisive role in history was religious. Here, from 1519, the priest Huldrych Zwingli preached a radical reform of the Church from the pulpit of the Grossmünster, the great Romanesque church that dominates the old town. With the backing of the city government, Zurich broke with Rome: images were removed from the churches, the Catholic mass was abolished, convents were closed and the mercenary business was attacked. Zurich thus became the first major centre of the Reformation in German-speaking lands, both a rival and a parallel to Luther's.
That choice of Protestantism set Zurich against the Catholic cantons of the centre and led to the Kappel wars, in the second of which, in 1531, Zwingli died in combat. His successor, Heinrich Bullinger, consolidated Reformed Zurich and turned it into a leading intellectual centre for European Protestantism. For centuries the city was an austere, hard-working, Calvinising stronghold, with a work ethic that shaped its character.
Modern Zurich grew out of that tradition of discipline and that commercial dynamism: a major banking and stock exchange centre, home to banks and insurers, and to the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), founded in 1855, one of the best technical universities in the world, whose lecture halls Albert Einstein passed through. Today Zurich combines that financial weight with an intense cultural life — it was, curiously, the birthplace of the Dada movement at the Cabaret Voltaire during the First World War — and consistently tops the world's quality-of-life rankings.
Bern was founded, according to tradition, in 1191 by Duke Berthold V of Zähringen in a tight bend of the river Aare, an almost perfect defensive position. Legend says the duke promised to name the city after the first animal he hunted, and that animal was a bear (Bär): the bear has been Bern's symbol ever since, on its coat of arms and in the pits where bears are still kept. Its medieval sandstone old town, with kilometres of arcades, Renaissance fountains and the astronomical clock tower (Zytglogge), is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Bern joined the Confederation in 1353, as the eighth canton, and in time became the most powerful city-state north of the Alps: through conquests and purchases it extended its rule over a vast territory reaching as far as Lake Geneva, including the whole of present-day Vaud. Governed by a closed patriciate, it was for centuries an aristocratic, Protestant and expansionist republic, one of the heavyweights of Swiss politics.
When the new federal Constitution created the modern state in 1848, Bern was chosen as the seat of government and parliament: the "federal city" (Bundesstadt), that is, Switzerland's de facto capital, even though the country, true to its decentralising spirit, has never formally named it "capital". It is home to the Federal Palace (Bundeshaus), the Federal Council and the Federal Assembly. In one of its houses a young patent office clerk named Albert Einstein lived between 1903 and 1905, and there he worked out much of the theory of relativity.
Basel, at the exact point where the Rhine turns north and where the borders of Switzerland, France and Germany meet today, was during the Renaissance one of the great intellectual centres of Europe. Its university, founded in 1460, is the oldest in Switzerland, and in the 15th century the city had already hosted the long Council of Basel (1431-1449). But what made it famous was the combination of two things: printing and humanism. Basel became a European capital of publishing, with workshops such as Johann Froben's, which published the great authors of the age with extraordinary care.
To that Basel came, and in it died, the greatest humanist of his time: Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Dutch scholar lived in the city for long stretches, worked side by side with the Basel printers — it was there that he published his edition of the New Testament in Greek — and found there an atmosphere of tolerance and love of letters that matched his ideal of a Christendom reformed from within and without violence. Erasmus died in Basel in 1536 and is buried in its cathedral (Münster). The painter Hans Holbein the Younger, who portrayed Erasmus, also produced much of his work in Basel.
Basel joined the Confederation in 1501 and embraced the Reformation shortly afterwards, though it kept its open, cosmopolitan outlook. That inheritance endures: today it is the capital of the global pharmaceutical industry — home to giants like Novartis and Roche —, a first-rank cultural centre with dozens of museums and the most important contemporary art fair on the planet, Art Basel. A border city, cultured and commercial, Basel remains the Switzerland most turned towards Europe.
Lucerne sits on the shore of Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee), the same lake on whose banks the Confederation was born in 1291. Ringed by the Pilatus and Rigi mountains, the city was for centuries the trading gateway between central Switzerland and the alpine Gotthard pass, a key route to Italy. In 1332 Lucerne became the first city to join the alliance of the three founding rural cantons, a decisive step: for the first time an urban community joined the peasant pact, enlarging it and giving it economic weight.
Two world-famous jewels remain from its medieval prosperity: the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke), a covered wooden bridge built around 1333, with its painted panels under the roof and its old octagonal tower, one of the oldest wooden bridges in Europe; and beside it the Museggmauer, the wall with its towers. Catholic and conservative, Lucerne was for centuries the bastion of the old faith against Protestant Zurich, and in the 19th century it led the Sonderbund side defeated in 1847.
A second Lucerne monument connects directly with the history of the Swiss mercenaries: the Lion Monument (Löwendenkmal), a huge dying lion carved into the rock that Mark Twain described as "the saddest and most moving piece of stone in the world". It commemorates the Swiss guards who died in Paris in 1792 defending King Louis XVI during the storming of the Tuileries Palace at the height of the French Revolution: the reminder in stone of those centuries when Switzerland's main export was its soldiers. Today Lucerne, with its lake and its classical music festival, is one of the most visited postcards in the country.
Valais (Wallis) occupies the great upper valley of the Rhône, a straight furrow more than a hundred kilometres long flanked by the highest peaks in Switzerland, among them the Matterhorn and the Dom. It is a land of sharp contrasts: the upper part (Oberwallis) is German-speaking, an inheritance from the Walser settlers, while the lower part is French-speaking, another sign of that language border that crosses the country. During the Middle Ages and into the modern period, Valais was largely a theocratic state: the prince-bishop of Sion (Sitten) held temporal power over the valley, and the peasant communities of upper Valais jealously defended their liberties against him and against the dukes of Savoy.
Valais was associated with the Confederation as an ally but was not a canton until very late. After the turbulent Napoleonic period — during which it even became a short-lived "department of the Simplon" annexed to France — it joined as a full canton in 1815, with the Congress of Vienna. Its capital, Sion, still has the castles of Valère and Tourbillon on two hills, witnesses to that long episcopal power, and its basilica houses one of the oldest organs in the world still in use.
A sunny, agricultural region, Valais is Switzerland's great vineyard — its slopes produce wines such as Fendant — and a land of great hydroelectric works, like the colossal Grande Dixence dam, one of the highest on the planet. But its worldwide fame is owed above all to its mountains: in the side valleys climbing up from the Rhône hide some of the most famous alpine resorts, led by Zermatt and its Matterhorn.
No mountain symbolises Switzerland like the Matterhorn (Cervin in French, Cervino in Italian), the almost perfect pyramid of 4.478 metres that rises above the village of Zermatt, in a side valley of Valais. During the golden age of alpinism it was the great unconquered summit, the last of the great Alpine mountains still to be climbed, and its ascent became an obsessive race between British and Italian climbers attempting it from both sides.
The summit was finally reached on 14 July 1865. An expedition led by the Briton Edward Whymper, with the guides Michel Croz and the Taugwalders, father and son, from Zermatt, and other companions, managed to top the Matterhorn by the Swiss ridge. But triumph turned into catastrophe on the descent: one of the climbers slipped and dragged three others down with him, and they fell to their deaths off the north face when the rope joining them broke. Of the seven who had reached the summit, only three survived. The tragedy shook Europe — there were even suspicions, later dismissed, that the rope had been cut — and marked the end of the golden age of alpinism.
That tragic conquest made Zermatt famous overnight. The village, until then a modest mountain hamlet, became one of the meccas of mountaineering and later of world tourism. Today Zermatt is a luxury resort with no combustion-engine cars, a goal for climbers, skiers and travellers who come from all over the planet drawn by the silhouette of the Matterhorn, the most photographed mountain in the world and the emblem of, among other things, a well-known Swiss chocolate brand.
South of the Alps, where the landscape turns Mediterranean — lakes ringed by palm trees, stone houses, Lombard bell towers — lies Ticino, the only entirely Italian-speaking canton. Its history is different from that of the rest of Switzerland, because Ticino did not join the Confederation freely: it was conquered. Between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in the context of the Italian Wars, the Swiss cantons seized these territories from the Duchy of Milan and turned them into bailiwicks (baliaggi), subject lands administered by bailiffs whom the cantons sent in rotation to govern — and often to enrich themselves.
For some three centuries Ticino was thus a dominated land, with no voice of its own in the Confederation, governed from the north by lords who did not speak its language. That subordinate condition ended only with the Helvetic Revolution: during the short-lived Helvetic Republic two cantons were created, Bellinzona and Lugano, and Napoleon's Act of Mediation merged them in 1803 into a single canton, Ticino, which for the first time entered the Confederation as a full member, equal to the rest.
Since then Ticino has been Italian Switzerland: loyal to the Confederation but proud of its Mediterranean language and culture, which in the 1930s led Mussolini's fascist Italy to claim it as "ethnically Italian" territory — a claim Switzerland flatly rejected, reaffirming its multilingual identity. Its main cities, Lugano — on the shore of its lake, today an important financial and tourist centre — and Locarno, combine Italian charm with Swiss organisation, and make Ticino one of the country's best-loved destinations, above all for the Swiss of the north who come down looking for sun and palm trees.
In south-eastern Switzerland, in the canton of the Grisons (Graubünden), lies the Engadine, the high valley of the river Inn, which runs at more than 1.800 metres of altitude between mountains and lakes. It is one of the last homelands of Romansh, that Romance language descended from Latin which survives in the valleys of the Grisons; in the Upper Engadine the Ladin variant is spoken, and many place names — including that of St. Moritz itself, San Murezzan in Romansh — preserve that thousand-year-old root. The Grisons, the old Grey League, were for centuries a confederation of independent mountain communities associated with Switzerland, and only became a canton in 1803.
It was in the Engadine, and more specifically in St. Moritz, that winter tourism as we know it was born. Until the mid-19th century travellers went to the Alps only in summer; winter was considered a dead, inhospitable season. In the autumn of 1864 the hotelier Johannes Badrutt, of the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz, made four English guests a famous bet: he invited them to come back in winter and promised to pay for their journey if they did not enjoy the sun and snow of the Engadine. The English accepted, returned in December, stayed until spring delighted by the bright, cold climate, and on getting back to England spread the word. An entire industry had been born.
St. Moritz thus became the cradle of winter tourism and a byword for alpine luxury. The town organised the first winter sports competitions, gave its name to legendary runs such as the Cresta Run bobsleigh track, and twice hosted the Winter Olympic Games, in 1928 and in 1948. Together with other Grisons resorts — such as Davos, today the seat of the World Economic Forum — the Engadine consolidated a model of elegant, international alpine tourism. Out of that bet by the fireplace of the Kulm Hotel came, to a large extent, the whole winter Switzerland the world knows today.
Southern Switzerland is, in miniature, a summary of the whole country: within a radius of a few valleys you find the French of lower Valais, the German of upper Valais, the Italian of Ticino and the Romansh of the Engadine. It is living proof that Switzerland is not a nation of one language or one culture, but a "nation by will" that has made diversity its badge of identity. Nowhere else can you see so clearly how alpine geography — valleys isolated from one another by high passes — preserved different languages and traditions for centuries just a few kilometres apart.
That same geography, once a byword for poverty and isolation, is today the region's greatest asset. Great Swiss engineering works have bored through the Alps with legendary tunnels — the Gotthard, the Simplon, and in the 21st century the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest in the world — that connect the Germanic north with the Italian south and with the rest of Europe. What was a barrier for centuries has become a crossroads.
From the bishopric of Sion to the dungeons of the Ticino bailiffs, from the Matterhorn drama to the Kulm Hotel bet, the south of Switzerland condenses the great lines of the country's history: the late, negotiated formation of the Confederation, the conquest and then the integration of diverse lands, the passage from mountain poverty to tourist prosperity, and the always delicate and always successful coexistence of peoples who speak different languages and have decided, in spite of everything, to go on being one country.
Western Switzerland, around the great arc of Lake Geneva (lac Léman), is la Suisse romande, French-speaking Switzerland. Its language is the trace of the Burgundians who became Latinised after the fall of Rome, and its history was for centuries very different from that of the German cantons of the original pact. These lands — Vaud, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Valais — were long under the orbit of the Duchy of Savoy, of the bishopric of Geneva and of other lordships, not of the Confederation.
The great turn came in the 16th century. Powerful Bern, Protestant and expansionist, conquered the Vaud country in 1536, until then Savoyard, and imposed the Reformation there; Vaud would be governed by Bern as subject territory for more than two centuries. Geneva, for its part, shook off the rule of its bishops and of Savoy and became an independent republic allied with the Swiss cantons. French Switzerland thus attached itself to the Confederation as a zone of associated and subject territories rather than as a full member.
Full integration came late. Vaud only freed itself from Bern with the Helvetic Revolution of 1798 and became a canton in 1803; Geneva, Neuchâtel and Valais did not join as cantons until 1815, with the Congress of Vienna. That is why Romandy has a particular relationship with the rest of the country: it shares institutions and neutrality but looks culturally towards France, and every so often votes differently from the German-speaking majority, marking that invisible border — the Röstigraben — that still separates the two Switzerlands.
Geneva, at the south-western tip of the lake, is one of the most influential cities in European history, far beyond what its size would suggest, and it is so above all because of one man: John Calvin (Jean Calvin). The French theologian and jurist arrived in Geneva in 1536, shortly after the city had embraced the Reformation and expelled its bishop, and with some interruptions he governed it spiritually until his death in 1564. Under his direction Geneva became a religious republic of extreme severity, ruled by a consistory that policed the conduct and faith of its citizens.
Calvin's Geneva became the capital of Calvinism and a beacon for Protestants across Europe. Thousands of refugees persecuted for their faith came to it — French Huguenots, Italians, English, Scots — and they called it "the Protestant Rome". From Geneva, Calvinism radiated out to France, the Netherlands, Scotland (where it inspired John Knox) and the American colonies, shaping an enormous part of the modern world. Calvin also founded, in 1559, the Academy of Geneva, the seed of today's university. That past is carved into the great Reformation Wall, in the Parc des Bastions, presided over by the colossal figures of Calvin and his companions.
Geneva nonetheless remained an independent republic and did not join the Swiss Confederation until 1815. Its character as a city of refuge, cultured and cosmopolitan, survived the Reformation: it was the adopted home of Voltaire and of Rousseau — who was born there in 1712 —, a centre of precision watchmaking and, by the 19th and 20th centuries, the natural seat of international diplomacy. The same vocation for sheltering the persecuted that defined it in Calvin's time explains, to a large extent, its later destiny as the humanitarian capital of the world.
Geneva's second great vocation, the humanitarian and diplomatic one, was also born here and in the 19th century. In 1859 the Genevan merchant Henri Dunant happened to witness the aftermath of the battle of Solferino, in northern Italy: tens of thousands of wounded men left to their fate, with nobody to care for them. Moved, he wrote A Memory of Solferino (1862) and proposed creating neutral relief societies to help the war wounded regardless of which side they were on. From that idea the International Committee of the Red Cross was born in Geneva in 1863, its emblem — the red cross on a white background — the Swiss flag with the colours reversed, in homage to the host country.
The following year, in 1864, the Swiss government sponsored the signing in Geneva of the first Geneva Convention, the founding treaty of international humanitarian law, which obliged armies to care for all the wounded and to respect medical personnel. For this Dunant would receive, in 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prize in history. The Red Cross and the successive Geneva Conventions made the city the world capital of humanitarian aid and of the laws of war.
On that basis, and thanks to the credibility of Swiss neutrality, Geneva became the seat of international diplomacy. After the First World War it hosted the League of Nations, installed in the Palace of Nations; today it is the European headquarters of the UN and of a constellation of bodies: the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, UNHCR, the International Labour Organization and many more. Treaties are negotiated in Geneva, crises are handled there and delegations from all over the planet meet there. Few cities in the world concentrate so much influence over global governance.
Lausanne, capital of the canton of Vaud, spreads over steep terraces above the northern shore of Lake Geneva, crowned by its Gothic cathedral, one of the finest in Switzerland. Like the rest of Vaud, it was under the rule of the bishopric and of Savoy, adopted the Reformation when Bern conquered it in 1536, and only became an independent canton with the fall of the Ancien Régime. A university and cultural city, it was for centuries a place of passage and residence for writers and intellectuals drawn by the lake landscape; the historian Edward Gibbon finished his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire there.
But what has given Lausanne worldwide standing is sport. Since 1915 the city has been the seat of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), installed there by its founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, precisely because of the security Swiss neutrality offered in the middle of the First World War. Coubertin, who revived the Olympic Games in 1896, spent his last years in Lausanne and is buried in the city.
Since then Lausanne has officially been the "Olympic Capital". It houses the IOC headquarters, the Olympic Museum on the lakeshore and the international federations of numerous sports, as well as the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which settles the world's big sporting disputes. The city has thus become the governing centre of international sport, a role it combines with its academic prestige — its Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) is one of the leading ones in Europe — and with the serene beauty of its setting above Lake Geneva.
At the eastern end of Lake Geneva, where the mountains begin to close in on the water, stands Chillon Castle (Château de Chillon), perhaps the most photographed monument in Switzerland. Built on a rock at the lake's edge, it controlled the strategic route between northern Europe and Italy over the Great St Bernard pass. For centuries it was the fortress and residence of the counts and dukes of Savoy, who from here dominated the lake and charged tolls to those crossing it. When Bern conquered Vaud in 1536 it also took Chillon and used it as a fortress, arsenal and prison.
Chillon owes its literary fame to a prisoner and a poet. In its dungeons the Genevan patriot François Bonivard was chained between 1530 and 1536, imprisoned by Savoy for defending Geneva's independence. Almost three centuries later, in 1816, the English poet Lord Byron visited the castle and wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, a poem that turned the fortress into an icon of Romanticism and an obligatory stop for the cultured tourism then beginning to travel through Switzerland. Byron even carved his name on one of the columns in the basement.
Very close by, the town of Montreux benefited from that same Romantic discovery of Lake Geneva and from its mild, almost Mediterranean microclimate, which lets palm trees grow on the lakeshore. Turned into an elegant summer resort in the Belle Époque, Montreux achieved worldwide fame in the 20th century thanks to its jazz festival, founded in 1967, which every summer brings together the great names in music. The town also became linked to the history of rock: the band Queen had its recording studios there, and a statue of its singer, Freddie Mercury, now looks out over the lake from the promenade, facing the same waters that inspired Byron.