Bern

The capital on the Aare

Bern sits on the Swiss Plateau, the lower, gentler band of the country that lies between the Jura and the Alps proper, built on a bend of the river Aare and surrounded by wooded hills rather than peaks. The Old Town, largely rebuilt in sandstone after a fire in 1405, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983 and is compact enough to see on foot in an afternoon, with the Alps visible from several points along the river on a clear day despite being sixty or more kilometres away. This is not high mountain country, and the region makes no pretence otherwise: the walking here is about wooded hills, farmland and long views rather than glaciers.

Gantrisch and the Emmental

South of the city, the Gantrisch Nature Park covers a range of rounded summits reaching over 2,200m at their highest point, Schafberg (2,239m), noticeably lower and gentler than the peaks visible beyond them, with deep valleys and a reputation as the region’s best easy walking country. East of Bern, the Emmental gives its name to the cheese and is exactly the landscape the name suggests: rolling dairy country, wooden farmhouses, and a network of valley and ridge paths that rarely climb far. The high point of the wider region between Bern and Lucerne is the Napf (1,408m), from where the Emmental ridge walk, a roughly 15km route starting at Lüderenalp, gives views across the plateau to the Alps on one side and the Jura on the other.

Walking and access

Most walking near Bern is low-level and reachable without a car: city buses and trains reach the edges of the Gantrisch park and the nearer Emmental villages, and the terrain rewards a half-day out rather than demanding a full logistics plan. It suits a stopover between the higher regions elsewhere in Switzerland better than a dedicated mountain trip, and the Bernese Mittelland’s farming villages, largely untouched by the tourism further south, are part of the appeal rather than a detour from it. The season is long by Swiss standards, since little of this walking depends on snow clearing from a pass: spring through autumn all work, with winter better suited to the city itself.