🇨🇭 Switzerland · Bernese Alps
Interlaken is the gateway to one of the most spectacular corners of the Alps: the Jungfrau region. The small town lies on a green plain between two incredibly turquoise lakes, Thun and Brienz, with the snowy summits of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau outlined behind. Its name comes from the Latin 'inter lacus', 'between lakes', and describes its geography perfectly: a flat strip of land, the Bödeli, wedged between mountains and water.
Let's be blunt: Interlaken is above all a logistical base. The town has its charm — the great Höhematte meadow with the Jungfrau as a backdrop, the Höheweg avenue with its 19th-century hotels, the casinos and watch shops — but what is truly memorable lies around it. From here the trains and cable cars leave for Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Wengen, Mürren, the Schilthorn and the legendary Jungfraujoch, the highest railway station in Europe. Interlaken is also the Swiss capital of adventure sports: paragliding, bungee jumping, rafting, canyoning.
This guide covers it with a practical eye: what you can see and do in the town itself (the Harder Kulm viewpoint, the boats on both lakes, the Höhematte, paragliding over the rooftops), how to use it as a base for the region's big excursions, and how to make sense of the transport passes and cable car prices, which are the big budget headache in this area. Interlaken is expensive, but it is the key to experiencing some of the most impressive alpine landscapes on the planet.
Interlaken's history begins with a monastery. Around 1130 a community of Augustinian canons was founded here between the two lakes and for almost four centuries it was the great landlord of the region, until the Bernese Protestant Reformation dissolved and secularised it in 1528. The village, called Aarmühle until 1891, was barely a hamlet until in the 19th century Romanticism and English tourism discovered it: travellers, poets and musicians such as Lord Byron and Felix Mendelssohn fell for the Jungfrau landscape, and hotels began to multiply along the Höheweg avenue. In 1864 a group of residents and hoteliers signed a pact so that the great Höhematte meadow would remain free of buildings forever and the view of the mountain would not be blocked: that agreement still stands. The arrival of the railway and, in 1912, of the Jungfrau train, cemented Interlaken as the tourist capital of the Bernese Alps. Today it receives visitors from all over the world — with a strong Asian presence — who use it as a base to explore the region. 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.
Before there were hotels, casinos and paragliders, there was a monastery on this green plain wedged between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. And that monastery gave the town its name. Around 1130 a community of Augustinian canons regular was founded here, first mentioned in a document of 1133, when the Holy Roman Emperor Lothair III (Lothair II as duke) took it under his protection. The monks Latinised the place as 'inter lacus', 'between the lakes', and from that came Interlaken.
The Augustinian monastery was no ordinary convent. For almost four centuries it was the great power of the district: it accumulated lands, rights and serfs throughout the Bödeli valley and much of the Oberland, and became a double house, with a male and a female branch. Its church and buildings, beside the river Aare, were the spiritual and economic centre of a region of mountain farmers and shepherds. The canons' power over the valley's inhabitants became, over time, a source of tension and popular resentment.
Geography explains everything. The Bödeli, that strip of flat, fertile land formed by the sediment the rivers deposited between the two lakes, was a strategic spot: it controlled the way into the high Jungfrau valleys — Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald — and the traffic between the two lake basins. Whoever controlled the Bödeli controlled the gateway to the mountains. And through the Middle Ages, the one who controlled it was the monastery.
The 16th century changed Interlaken forever. In 1528, the powerful city-state of Bern, on which the region depended, officially adopted the Protestant Reformation after a famous theological debate. Bern's decision swept its whole territory along, and the Augustinian monastery of Interlaken — a symbol of the old Catholic order and of an unloved seigneurial power — was dissolved and secularised that same year. Its property, lands and revenues passed to the Bernese state.
Secularisation was not a quiet formality. Peasant discontent with the monastery went back a long way, and the Reformation mixed with rural revolts in the Oberland. Bern eventually imposed its authority and turned the old monastery buildings into the seat of an administrator (a 'Landvogt' or bailiff) who governed the district in the city's name. The old cloister passed to civil uses; over the centuries part of the complex even served as a hospital. The castle church (Schlosskirche) and buildings of that monastery are still preserved today, incorporated into Schloss Interlaken.
Through the following centuries, Interlaken — or more exactly the hamlet of Aarmühle, 'the mill on the Aare', as the main settlement was called until 1891 — remained a small rural place of farmers, millers and craftspeople, in the shadow of the great mountains. Nothing suggested that this village between lakes would become, in barely a few decades of the 19th century, one of the tourist capitals of Europe. For that to happen, a change was needed in the way Europeans looked at mountains.
For centuries the Alps were seen as a dangerous obstacle, a place of dragons and avalanches that travellers preferred to cross quickly and in fear. That changed with Romanticism. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, poets, painters and travellers — above all British and German — began to look at the high mountains with different eyes: no longer as a threat, but as the setting of the sublime, of a wild, overwhelming beauty that put human beings face to face with the immensity of nature. And few landscapes embodied that idea better than the Jungfrau massif seen from Interlaken.
Among the first great illustrious visitors was Lord Byron, who travelled the Bernese Oberland in 1816 — the 'year without a summer' — and was so struck by the Jungfrau, its waterfalls and its storms that he set his poetic drama 'Manfred' in these landscapes. Shortly afterwards, in 1831, the young composer Felix Mendelssohn visited the region and drew and described it with enthusiasm; the musicians, writers and artists of Romanticism turned the Jungfrau into a cultural icon. Later came other famous names drawn by the place's reputation, at a time when doing the 'Grand Tour' of Switzerland was fashionable among the well-off.
Tourism, then, transformed the hamlet. Along an old walnut avenue facing the great meadow, ever larger and more luxurious hotels began to go up: the Höheweg was born, the elegant spine of the modern town, with establishments such as the one that would become the Victoria-Jungfrau. Interlaken specialised in something very specific: being the comfortable, refined balcony from which to contemplate one of the most famous mountains in the world. The farming village was turning into a town of hoteliers.
In the middle of that hotel-building boom something exceptional happened, an episode that today seems incredible and that defines Interlaken's character. Opposite the grand hotels of the Höheweg lay an enormous open meadow, the Höhematte, of about 14 hectares, which had belonged to the old monastery. With the town growing and land ever more valuable, the temptation to build on it — blocking forever the view of the Jungfrau that was, precisely, the town's great attraction — was enormous.
In 1864, a group of 37 local landowners and hoteliers took a visionary decision: instead of dividing the meadow up to build on it, they signed a pact to keep it open in perpetuity. They set up a company, the Höhe-Interessentschaft, which bought and consolidated the property on the condition that no building would ever be raised on it. They understood that the clear view of the mountain was worth, in the long run, far more than any hotel: it was everyone's capital.
That agreement, signed more than 160 years ago, is still in force and still kept. That is why today, in the middle of a tourist town, there is a great green field where paragliders land, people picnic and lie back to look at the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau, with not a single building in the way. The Höhematte is a planning oddity — one of the most remarkable and earliest planning decisions in Switzerland — and at the same time the best summary of what Interlaken managed to be: a place that understood its treasure was the landscape and protected it in writing.
If Romanticism put Interlaken on the map, the railway turned it into a tourist power. From the second half of the 19th century, Switzerland went through a fever of mountain railway building that took rails to places previously out of reach. In 1872 the Bödelibahn opened, the first line connecting Interlaken with the network and with the lake quays; in 1890 the trains to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald arrived, throwing the Jungfrau region wide open to the ordinary visitor.
The great symbol of that era was the Jungfraubahn, the Jungfrau railway. In 1893, during a walk, the entrepreneur and industrialist Adolf Guyer-Zeller conceived the bold idea — for many, a madness — of building a rack railway that would climb 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 was brutally hard: sixteen years of drilling through rock in extreme conditions, with accidents and worker deaths, many of them Italian immigrants. The train finally reached the Jungfraujoch in 1912, creating the highest railway station in Europe, nicknamed the 'Top of Europe'.
That engineering feat cemented Interlaken as the undisputed base for the whole region: the place where travellers slept, ate and set off from to experience the high mountains. Through the 20th century, cable cars, funiculars and rack railways were added — to First, to the Schilthorn, to the Männlichen — weaving one of the densest mountain transport networks on the planet. The most recent big project is the Eiger Express, the tricable gondola opened in December 2020 that climbs from the Grindelwald Terminal and drastically shortened the trip to the Jungfraujoch, well into the 21st century.
The 20th and 21st centuries turned Interlaken into a mass destination of worldwide reach. To the old British and European clientele of Romantic tourism were added, first, travellers from all over the West and, in recent decades, a very strong flow of Asian tourism — Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian — that made the Jungfraujoch one of Asia's dream excursions. In high season it is not unusual to hear more Asian languages than German on the Höheweg avenue, or to find signs and menus designed for that clientele.
At the same time, Interlaken reinvented itself as the adventure sports capital of the Alps: paragliding, bungee jumping, rafting, canyoning, skiing and snowboarding turned the town into a magnet for young travellers and backpackers from all over the world, with a hostel and active-tourism scene that lives alongside the grand classic hotels. That dual profile — historic luxury and low-cost adrenaline — is one of its hallmarks.
That success has a downside. In high season, the town and above all the most photographed spots in the region (Lauterbrunnen, the Iseltwald jetty, the Jungfraujoch itself) suffer crowding and saturation, one more case in the overtourism debates affecting many alpine icons. And prices, already high in Switzerland, make this an expensive region for visitors. But the essential thing has not changed since Byron's day: people still come to Interlaken for the same reason, to stand in a meadow between two lakes and stare, open-mouthed, at the white and blue wall of the Jungfrau. That meadow, thanks to the pact of 1864, is still there, open and unbuilt, keeping its promise.