8 June 2026
We had a wonderful holiday in Switzerland to celebrate the start of my retirement. We started in Basel in the north of the country, next to the borders with France and Germany, where our first challenge was to leave the airport through the Switzerland exit rather than end up in the wrong country! Basel is a lovely small city, with a pretty old town on either side of the impressive Rhine river. We visited the Fondation Beyeler art gallery - a stunning Renzo Piano building set in a beautiful garden with views of the nearby hills - to see an exhibition of Paul Cezanne paintings. We also attended an orchestral concert at the Stadtcasino concert hall which featured four concertos played by students from the Basel Academy of Music, accompanied by the Basel Symphony Orchestra. After Basel we travelled by train to Wengen in the Jungfrau region - a car-free village halfway up a mountain, only accessible via a cogwheel train. Our self-catering chalet was just outside Wengen and the view from our balcony was beautiful, looking down the Lauterbrunnen valley and across the three mountains - Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger. As we sat on the balcony in the late afternoon we heard the increasing sound of cowbells and watched the cows being walked downhill for milking right past our cottage. We had a wonderful week in the mountains, catching the cable cars and mountain railways, walking, taking a cruise on Lake Brienz and soaking up the amazing views. From Wengen we moved on to Bern - the capital of Switzerland - which has a very pretty old city contained within a loop of the river Aare. It reminded us of Edinburgh's old town, with its cobbled streets and tall, thin, many storied buildings - but with added porticos (like we saw in Bologna). We visited the Einsteinhaus museum - in the apartment in which Einstein had once lived - and the Zentrum Paul Klee - another stunning modern building, by Renzo Piano, which holds 4,000 works by Paul Klee and displays a small selection on rotation. Finally we had a couple of days in Geneva where we travelled across the edge of Lake Geneva on the Mouette water buses, giving us beautiful views of the water and showing us how quickly you can get out of the city into lovely countryside. You can see a selection of my photos from Switzerland at: https://culturaloutlook.blogspot.com/search/label/Switzerland2026
