The Best Places to Travel in Switzerland: 5 Picks Worth Your Trip

Lucerne compresses the Swiss postcard into a walkable old town: the Chapel Bridge with its Water Tower, the surviving Musegg city wall, the Lion Monument, and a lakefront that opens straight onto the Alps. What makes it the best all-round base is the mountain access. A lake boat reaches Vitznau at the foot of the Rigi cogwheel railway, the world's steepest cogwheel line climbs Mount Pilatus from Alpnachstad, and the rotating cable car to the Titlis glacier leaves from Engelberg, roughly an hour away.

Two full days covers the town itself; four or five days lets you add two or three summits without changing hotels. Stay in or near the old town if you want atmosphere, or by the station if you want to move fast.

Zermatt is the answer when you want the Matterhorn itself, not a photograph of it. The village is car-free — you park in Täsch and take the shuttle train up — and the classic excursions are all here: the Gornergrat cogwheel railway, running since 1898, up to a ridge just over 3,000 m with the Monte Rosa massif in front of you, and the cable car to Matterhorn Glacier Paradise at 3,883 m, the highest cable-car station in Europe.

Hiking starts at the village floor, so non-climbers get big views without big effort, and the glacier ski area keeps lifts running outside the winter season. It is a three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Zurich via Visp, which is the price you pay for the scenery.

Interlaken sits on the hinge between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, and everything in the Bernese Oberland radiates from it. The Jungfrau Railway climbs to Jungfraujoch at 3,454 m, the highest railway station in Europe. The Lauterbrunnen valley has Staubbach Falls dropping roughly 300 m off the cliff. The First gondola from Grindelwald feeds straight into ridge walks, and car-free Wengen and Mürren make good quiet bases above the valley floor.

This is the region for people who want to be outdoors every day rather than look at scenery from a terrace: hiking, paragliding, via ferrata, multi-day trails, and enough hostels and apartments to keep families and groups within budget.

Bern is the capital and the country's most underrated city stop. The medieval old town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, threaded with one of Europe's longest covered shopping arcades, and the Zytglogge clock tower still puts on its moving-figure show on the hour. Below it, locals swim in the Aare in summer and watch from the Rose Garden above the river bend; the Bear Park, the Einstein house and the Kunstmuseum fill a rainy afternoon.

Bern matters in a Switzerland itinerary because it is a real working city rather than a resort — cheaper than Lucerne or Zermatt, central on the rail map, about an hour from Interlaken and an hour from Zurich. Use it as a two-night pause between mountain legs.

Lugano is Switzerland with an Italian accent. The lakefront is lined with palms, a funicular climbs Monte San Salvatore and another Monte Brè, and the olive trail above Gandria winds between stone villages and lake viewpoints. Ticino has the mildest climate in the country, so swimming in the lake lido is realistic from late spring into early autumn — something you cannot say about most Swiss lakes.

The city is under three hours from Zurich on the Gotthard route and about forty minutes from Como in Italy, which makes it the natural southern bookend to a trip: mountains in the north, lake and food in the south.