Travelling in Switzerland: a mountain range that runs to a timetable

Why the timetable is the itinerary

The rail network runs to 5,250 kilometres, virtually all of it electrified, and it carried 614 million passengers in 2023. Virtually all of it is electrified. The Swiss Federal Railways operate 60%, BLS AG runs the other standard-gauge network of any size, and two narrow-gauge companies hold the mountain lines: the Rhaetian Railway in Graubünden and the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn, which between them run the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St Moritz and Davos. Each resident travelled an average of 2,446 kilometres by rail in 2023, more than in any other European country, and a network built to that level of use does not thin out where the holiday traffic begins.

What follows for a visitor is that the network does not stop where the road stops. Postbuses, lake boats, funiculars, cable cars and cogwheel railways are timetabled and ticketed as part of the same system, and one pass covers rail, bus and boat together. Zermatt has no through road for cars at all, so the Matterhorn, at 4,478 metres the most photographed mountain in the country, is approached by train as a matter of course rather than as a novelty.

The consequence for planning is that a route through Switzerland is assembled out of connections rather than out of distances. A walk can begin at one valley station and end at another without returning to a parked car, which is the constraint that shapes walking almost everywhere else. The north to south spine is now the Gotthard Base Tunnel, at 57.1 kilometres the longest and deepest railway tunnel in the world and the first flat route through the Alps, so the crossing from the German-speaking cantons to Italian-speaking Ticino happens underground in minutes rather than over a pass in an afternoon.

How the walking network is signposted

About 65,000 kilometres of marked footpath cross a country of 41,291 square kilometres that measures 350 kilometres east to west and 220 north to south. Hiking is routinely described as the national sport, and the usage figures behind that phrase are unusual: roughly a third of the population walks regularly, covering 520 million kilometres in 130 million hours a year.

The signs are the part a first-time visitor notices. They give the walking time to the next place in hours and minutes rather than the distance in kilometres, because a kilometre on a steep gradient is not the same unit as a kilometre along a lake, and the network is graded so that a route suitable for a family and a route requiring mountaineering experience are not confused with one another.

The long routes run with the grain of the landscape. The Jura Crest Trail crosses the grazing country of the north-west to Mont Tendre, the highest point of the Swiss Jura. The Via Albula and Bernina climbs through moorland and alpine pasture to the Bernina pass in Graubünden. A separate family of routes exists purely to cross the suspension bridges built over the gorges. Above roughly 2,000 metres the trees stop and the alpine zone begins, which is also where permanent settlement stops: Juf, at 2,126 metres, is the highest permanently inhabited village in the country, and Ascona at 196 metres on Lake Maggiore is the lowest. Around 28.6% of the national territory is set aside as protected natural area, which is why so much of the walking passes through country that has not been built on.

Where the visitors actually stay

The distribution is lopsided, and it has been for a century. In 2011 the country held 4,967 registered hotels and hostels offering 240,000 beds in 128,000 rooms, saturated to 41.7% against 39.7% in 2005, for a total of 38.8 million lodging nights. Foreign visitors accounted for 56.4% of those nights.

Tourism intensity is the ratio of lodging nights to resident population, and the spread in 2011 between 8.3 in Graubünden and a national average of 1.3 is the whole argument about where the pressure sits. Two alpine cantons carry a visitor load several times the national figure while the cities the visitors arrive through carry very little of it.

The origin of the foreign half is equally concentrated. Germany supplied 16.5% of all lodging nights in 2011, the United Kingdom 6.3%, the United States 4.8%, France 3.6% and Italy 3.0%, which means the four immediate neighbours and one long-haul market account for most of the traffic that is not Swiss.

What the arrivals go to see is not what the marketing suggests. The most visited attraction in the country is the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen, the second is the bear enclosure at Bern, and neither charges admission. Third, and the first of them with a gate, is Zoo Basel. None of the three is in the high Alps, and two of the three are on the Plateau where hardly anybody plans to stay.

Why the seasons split the country apart

The vertical range from 193 metres at Lake Maggiore to 4,634 metres at the Dufourspitze puts six Köppen climate types inside one small quadrilateral, and the practical effect is that the season a visitor is planning for depends entirely on the altitude and the side of the Alps.

On the Plateau, where the cities are, the average is around 9 °C for ground between 400 and 600 metres, with roughly 1,000 millimetres of precipitation a year and freezing temperatures from December into early March. South of the Alps it is 2 to 4 °C warmer and wetter, with Locarno and Lugano averaging 12.4 °C. Locarno takes 1,897 millimetres of rain a year and still records 2,171 hours of sunshine against Zurich's manages 1,544 and Lucerne 1,570. The driest ground is not the sunniest lowland but the inner alpine valleys, Sion in the Valais at 603 millimetres being described as semi-arid.

The extremes are worth stating because they are so far apart in a country this size. The highest temperature on record is 41.5 °C at Grono in August 2003; the lowest officially recorded is −41.8 °C at La Brévine in January 1987. The coldest meteorological station in the country stands at the Jungfraujoch, above the Aletsch Glacier.

Spring and autumn are the quiet seasons between the ski traffic and the walking traffic, which makes them the cheapest and the least crowded. The change in weather on crossing the Gotthard is abrupt enough to be noticeable on emerging from the tunnels, so a wet week north of the Alps is not a wet week everywhere. More on the underlying pattern sits in Switzerland: geography.

How alpine tourism was invented here

The industry has a documented starting point, which is rare. British mountaineers climbing the main peaks of the Bernese Alps in the early 19th century began it, the Alpine Club was founded in London in 1857, and the prominence of those peaks in British climbing is why the Bernese Oberland was the best known Swiss destination for so long. Thomas Cook and the Lunn company sold the first organised holidays to Switzerland during the same century, and until the 20th century the whole business was for the rich.

The second strand was medical. Convalescence in the alpine air, tuberculosis above all, built Davos and its counterparts in Graubünden through the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the sanatorium architecture with its south-facing balconies is still standing in those towns under other uses.

Literature did the rest. The Reichenbach Falls at Meiringen became the site of Sherlock Holmes's fictional death in 1893, and visitors have been going to a waterfall to look at the place where nobody died ever since.

The inheritance matters on the ground. The rack railways, funiculars and grand hotels that make the high country reachable were capital projects aimed at a wealthy 19th-century clientele, and they survive because the state kept the transport integrated instead of letting the lines close. Official tourism statistics were planned as early as 1852, achieved only in 1934, and ran until 2003; since 2004 the Federal Statistical Office has published the figures jointly with Switzerland Tourism.

What the World Heritage list actually holds

Switzerland ratified the World Heritage Convention on 17 September 1975 and has 13 properties inscribed, nine cultural and four natural. Read as a list, it is a fair statement of what the country thinks it is.

The natural four are the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch, inscribed in 2001 as the first alpine natural site and extended in 2007, Monte San Giorgio in Ticino for its fossil beds, inscribed in 2003 and extended in 2010, the Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona in 2008, where the mountain building is legible in the rock face, and a share of the transnational listing of ancient European beech forests. The Aletsch Glacier at the centre of the first of them holds eleven billion tonnes of ice, one of about 1,800 Swiss glaciers covering some 1,200 square kilometres.

The cultural nine are more revealing. Alongside the Old City of Berne, the Abbey of St Gall and the Benedictine convent of St John at Müstair, all inscribed in 1983, and the three castles of Bellinzona in 2000, the list carries the Lavaux vineyard terraces above Lake Geneva from 2007, the prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps from 2011, and the architectural work of Le Corbusier from 2016. Two entries make the point about this country better than the rest. The Rhaetian Railway in the Albula and Bernina landscapes was inscribed in 2008 as a working railway rather than a monument, and La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle were inscribed in 2009 for town planning organised around watch manufacture, which is covered further in Switzerland: economy.

How the language regions change a visit

Four national languages divide the country by ground rather than by class. In 2020, 62.3% of the population spoke German at home, 22.8% French, 8% Italian and 0.5% Romansh. The line runs near Bern: east of it and outside Ticino the country speaks German, west of it French, in Ticino and the southern valleys of Graubünden Italian, and Romansh survives in several valleys of Graubünden alone.

Across 350 kilometres that means three or four different linguistic environments, and the switch is real rather than decorative. Menus, signage, station announcements and the register of hospitality change at the boundary, and so does the food, which is treated at length in Switzerland: culture. Ticino reads as northern Italy because climatically and culturally it is on that side of the mountains, and the lakes it shares with Italy are the warmest places in the country.

Entry is straightforward and slightly unusual. Switzerland has been in the Schengen Area since 12 December 2008, so there is no routine passport check arriving from Germany, France, Italy, Austria or Liechtenstein, but the country is outside the European Union customs territory, so goods still cross a customs frontier. The currency is the Swiss franc and not the euro.

Why the country costs what it costs

Tourism is a smaller part of the economy than the scenery suggests and a much larger part of some regions. It accounted for an estimated 2.6% of GDP in 2016, worth CHF 16.8 billion, against CHF 12.8 billion at the same 2.6% share in 2001. The gross value added from tourism was CHF 14.9 billion in 2010, about 2.9% of a nominal GDP of CHF 550.57 billion that year, supporting 144,838 full-time equivalent jobs. The total financial volume associated with tourism including transport came to roughly CHF 35.5 billion in 2010, though part of that is fuel tax and motorway vignettes rather than visitor spending. Around 4% of the national workforce was employed in the sector as of 2023.

Costs follow from the wider economy rather than from the visitor trade. Zurich, Geneva and Basel combine some of the highest quality-of-life scores in the world with some of the highest costs of living, and a country that pays alpine wages to run a cable car in December cannot then sell the ride cheaply. The compensation is that the expensive thing works: the connection is met, the hut is staffed, the path is maintained and the funicular runs in weather that would close it elsewhere. Eight of the ten best hotel schools in the world are Swiss, which is a fact about staffing rather than about marble.

The cheap version of the country is available and it is mostly outdoors. Walking on 65,000 kilometres of maintained path costs nothing, the two most visited attractions in the country charge no admission, and the shoulder seasons in spring and autumn move the whole calculation. What cannot be economised is the transport, and given that the transport is what makes the mountains reachable, that is the trade a visit here is built on.