About Bern

A city named after a bear

Duke Berchtold V of Zähringen founded Bern in 1191 on a naturally fortified river bend, and legend says he named it after the first animal he hunted there — a bear (Bär). Bears have been the city's symbol ever since, kept in Bern continuously since 1513 and today living in a riverside park below the old town.

After a fire destroyed the wooden town in 1405, Bern rebuilt itself in green-grey sandstone — and that rebuilt city is essentially what stands today. When the modern Swiss state was created in 1848, modest, central Bern was chosen as the federal city over larger Zurich and Geneva; parliament still sits in the domed Bundeshaus above the Aare.

Six kilometres of arcades

Bern's old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its signature is the Lauben — six kilometres of continuous covered arcades lining the main streets, effectively one of Europe's longest weatherproof shopping promenades, sheltering everything from 500-year-old cellars turned into theatres and bars to modern boutiques.

Down the middle of Kramgasse and Marktgasse runs a parade of Renaissance fountains topped with painted figures — knights, bears, and the child-eating Chindlifresser. The showpiece is the Zytglogge, the 13th-century clock tower whose astronomical clock has performed its mechanical show every hour since 1530. A few doors down at Kramgasse 49, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein wrote the papers of his 'miracle year' 1905, including E=mc²; his flat is now a small museum.

The river is the beach

Bern's great summer ritual is the Aare swim: locals walk upstream, drop into the glacier-fed, astonishingly turquoise river, and float home past the parliament building, climbing out at the free Marzili baths. It is one of the most extraordinary things you can do in any capital city — and it costs nothing.

Across the high Nydegg bridge, the Rose Garden gives the classic postcard view over the old town's roofscape, and the Gurten — Bern's local mountain, reached by a little red funicular — offers playgrounds, picnic lawns, and a panorama from the Jura to the Bernese Alps. The Zentrum Paul Klee, in a rolling glass building by Renzo Piano, holds the world's largest Klee collection.

Capital, but calm

Bern may run the country, but its pace is famously unhurried — the local dialect is affectionately teased for its slowness, and the city takes the joke as a compliment. Food is hearty: the Bärner Platte of meats and sauerkraut, rösti in every form, and Toblerone, invented here in 1908, its triangles inspired — so the story goes — by the Matterhorn.

Bern sits at the centre of the Swiss rail map: Zurich and Basel under an hour, Interlaken 50 minutes, Geneva under two hours, and the Zermatt line via Visp equally simple. Come in summer for the river, in December for the old-town Christmas markets under the arcades — the city is beautiful in any weather, because in Bern you can walk for kilometres without ever stepping into the rain.

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