🇨🇭 Switzerland · Bernese Alps
The Jungfraujoch is probably the most famous (and most expensive) excursion in Switzerland: taking a train up to 3.454 metres, to the highest railway station in Europe, in a place the Swiss proudly named the 'Top of Europe'. It is not a village or a summit conquered with effort: it is a glacier saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau that you reach comfortably seated, thanks to an early 20th-century engineering feat that bored a tunnel kilometres long through the rock of the Eiger and the Mönch.
At the top a world of ice and altitude awaits: the Sphinx viewpoint at 3.571 metres, with a vertiginous lift and a terrace looking out over a sea of peaks; the Ice Palace, a maze of tunnels and sculptures carved inside the glacier; the Alpine Sensation exhibition, which tells the story of the line and honours the workers who built it; and, above all, the view of the Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps and a UNESCO site, unfolding like a river of ice towards the horizon.
This guide tells you what really matters so you do not end up disappointed: exactly how much it costs (a lot) and what discounts the Swiss passes give, how to avoid altitude sickness when you climb 3.000 metres in little over an hour, why it is essential to check the webcams before buying your ticket (if it is cloudy you see nothing) and what to expect from an experience that is, to a large extent, indoors. With the right information, the 'Top of Europe' is an unforgettable day; without it, it can be an expensive disappointment.
The story of the Jungfraujoch is the story of an obsession. In 1893, the Swiss industrialist Adolf Guyer-Zeller conceived the idea of a railway that would climb the Jungfrau by boring through the mountains. Work on the Jungfraubahn began in 1896 and went on for sixteen years, digging a tunnel through the Eiger and the Mönch in brutally hard conditions; the work was done mainly by Italian labourers, and around thirty died in accidents over the course of the project. Guyer-Zeller did not live to see it finished: he died in 1899. The original plan was to reach the summit of the Jungfrau itself, but it was never completed: the line stopped at the Jungfraujoch saddle, opened on 1 August 1912. In 1937 the Sphinx observatory was built there, and the complex also became an important high-mountain scientific research station. At its feet stretches the Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, today retreating because of climate change. 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.
The story of the Jungfraujoch begins with a walk and a vision. Tradition has it that on a Sunday in August 1893, the 54-year-old Swiss industrialist and railway magnate Adolf Guyer-Zeller was looking out from the heights of the Jungfrau region, near the Schynige Platte, at the imposing wall of summits of the Eiger, the Mönch and the Jungfrau. There, gazing at the mountains, he conceived an idea almost everyone thought was madness: to build a railway that would climb to the very top of the Jungfrau, boring through the rock of the mountains from inside.
It was an age of absolute faith in progress and engineering. Switzerland was going through a fever of mountain railways that were opening the summits to tourism, and Guyer-Zeller — who had made his fortune in textiles and railways — had the money, the daring and the determination to attempt the impossible. His project envisaged a line starting at Kleine Scheidegg, already connected by the Wengernalpbahn, climbing through a tunnel dug inside the Eiger and the Mönch and reaching, through several intermediate stations, the summit of the Jungfrau itself, at more than 4.000 metres.
It was a colossal plan for late 19th-century technology: kilometres of tunnel through extremely hard rock, at high altitude, with brutal winters and rudimentary means. Guyer-Zeller obtained the concession and, with formidable energy, got the work under way. He could not imagine that this dream would cost him his life before he saw it finished, or that the original project would never be completed as he had conceived it.
Work on the Jungfraubahn began on 27 July 1896 with the first blast at Kleine Scheidegg. What followed was a sixteen-year epic. The rack railway line started in the open air and soon entered a tunnel more than seven kilometres long that had to be dug with drills and dynamite, gaining height inside the rock of the Eiger and the Mönch. Progress was slow and extremely costly: money ran out, the mountain sprang geological surprises and working conditions were extreme.
The bulk of the workforce was Italian, miners and labourers who came to Switzerland looking for wages and who endured the cold, the altitude, the noise, the dust and the constant danger of blasting and rockfalls. It was brutally hard and risky work: over the course of the project, around thirty workers died in accidents and many more were injured. One particularly serious episode was the accidental explosion of a dynamite store. The history of the Jungfraujoch, so often told as a feat of Swiss engineering, is also the history of those anonymous workers, most of them Italian, who paid for it with their labour and, some of them, with their lives. Today the Alpine Sensation exhibition, up at the saddle, remembers them explicitly.
Guyer-Zeller, the driving force behind the project, did not live to see it get far: he died in 1899, barely three years after work began, leaving his heirs to carry it on. The stations opened in stages: Eigergletscher in 1898, Eigerwand (with its windows looking out onto the Eiger north face) in 1903, Eismeer in 1905. Funding faltered and the initial ambition had to be scaled back.
Guyer-Zeller's original plan had the line reaching the summit of the Jungfrau itself, at 4.158 metres, by way of stations and lifts dug into the rock. But reality won out: costs soared, the works dragged on and funding was not enough for so much. In the end it was decided to stop the line at the Jungfraujoch, the glacier saddle between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, at 3.454 metres. The summit was never reached, and so the terminus ended up where we know it today.
On 21 February 1912, after sixteen years of work, the labourers drilled through the last metres of rock and reached the point where the Jungfraujoch station would stand. On 1 August 1912 — a symbolic date, Switzerland's national day — the line was officially opened. The Jungfraubahn thus became the highest railway in Europe and its station, at 3.454 metres, the highest railway station on the continent, a record it still holds today.
The result was one of the most extraordinary railway lines in the world: about nine kilometres of track, most of it in tunnel inside the mountains, covering an enormous height gain. Although it fell far short of the summit Guyer-Zeller had dreamed of, the Jungfraujoch exceeded every expectation as a tourist attraction. From the very start, travellers from all over Europe wanted to experience arriving comfortably by train in a world of ice and altitude that until then only climbers had set foot in.
The Jungfraujoch was not born only as a tourist destination: it was soon understood that this spot at 3.454 metres, with pure air and extreme conditions, was an exceptional place for science. In 1931 the International Foundation for High Altitude Research Stations Jungfraujoch and Gornergrat (HFSJG) was created, and through the 1930s permanent scientific facilities were built.
The crowning achievement of that effort was the Sphinx observatory, opened in 1937, perched on a rock pinnacle at 3.571 metres, above the station, and reached by a very fast lift dug into the mountain. With its astronomical dome and its terraces, the Sphinx became the symbol of the Jungfraujoch and, at the same time, one of the most important high-altitude research stations in the world. Since then, generations of scientists have worked here in astronomy, meteorology, glaciology, atmospheric physics and cosmic ray research, making use of the altitude, the stability and the purity of the setting.
That dual character — mass tourist attraction and first-rank scientific laboratory — is one of the Jungfraujoch's singularities. While thousands of visitors walk through the Ice Palace and the terraces each day, in the depths of the complex a handful of researchers maintain measurement series that in some cases go back almost a century and are enormously valuable for understanding the planet's climate and atmosphere. The 'Top of Europe' is thus both a spectacular viewpoint and a privileged observatory of the world.
At the foot of the Jungfraujoch is the birthplace of the region's great natural wonder: the Aletsch glacier, the largest and longest in the Alps, some 20 kilometres long and with masses of ice hundreds of metres thick built up over millennia. From the complex's terraces and, above all, from the Sphinx viewpoint, you see it descend majestically between the mountains like an immense white river, in one of the most impressive views in Europe.
In 2001, UNESCO recognised the exceptional value of this landscape by inscribing the Jungfrau-Aletsch region on the World Heritage list — the first area of the Alps to receive that distinction for its natural values — later extended to cover the whole glacial massif. It is a territory of extraordinary beauty and geological and ecological value, a living testimony to the processes that shaped the Alps.
But that wonder now faces a serious threat: global warming. Like almost all alpine glaciers, the Aletsch is in clear retreat, losing length and volume year after year at a rate scientists have seen accelerate in recent decades. Studies warn that, if the trend continues, much of the glacier could disappear over the course of this century. Looking at the Aletsch from the Jungfraujoch is therefore a double experience: admiring one of the continent's great natural wonders and, at the same time, becoming aware of its fragility. The complex's own exhibitions recall this process, turning the visit into more than a postcard: a reminder of what is at stake in the high mountains.
More than a century after it opened, the Jungfraujoch is still one of the most popular excursions in Switzerland and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world each year, many of them from Asia. The complex has been progressively enlarged and modernised: the Sphinx observatory and the Ice Palace have been joined by the Alpine Sensation exhibition, shops, restaurants, a viewpoint and a whole infrastructure designed to move large numbers of people about sheltered from the extreme cold.
The most important change of recent years came in 2020 with the opening of the Eiger Express, a modern tricable cable car that climbs from the new Grindelwald terminal to Eigergletscher in barely fifteen minutes, linking there with the Jungfraubahn. This project, part of the 'V-Bahn' scheme, significantly shortened the climb on the Grindelwald side and relieved pressure on the classic route, though it also fed the debate about tourist pressure in the region.
Going up to the Jungfraujoch today is an impeccably organised experience, but also an expensive one: the return ticket is around or above 200 Swiss francs, one of the highest prices paid anywhere in European tourism, and the national passes (Swiss Travel Pass, Half Fare Card) only bring it down in part. In exchange, in a few hours the visitor travels through one of the greatest railway feats in history, stands on a glacier at 3.454 metres and, if the sky cooperates, looks out over the Aletsch and a horizon of peaks that takes your breath away. Adolf Guyer-Zeller's outsized dream, paid for with the labour and the lives of those Italian workers, still stands more than a hundred years on, turned into one of the great icons of the Alps.