Swiss Alps

There is no sea here, but there is lake bathing. Most lakeside towns have a lido with lawns, jetties and diving boards. The water is very clean and usually cool. Lake Thun and Lake Brienz below the Jungfrau and the lakes of central Switzerland reach about 20°C in a warm August. Small mountain lakes such as the Caumasee near Flims are warmer than their height suggests, and quite beautiful.

For warmer water, head south to Ticino, where Lake Lugano and Lake Maggiore reach about 23°C in high summer. Even there, the season runs only from late June to early September, and a swim is something to fit between hikes. Nobody plans an Alps vacation around it.

Alpine cooking is cheese country, and it is best eaten high up. Expect fondue, raclette scraped from a half wheel in Valais, rösti, air-dried beef from Graubünden and capuns wrapped in chard. Mountain restaurants and huts serve these on sunny terraces at the top of the lifts. Valais is also a real wine region. Its steep terraced vineyards above the Rhône grow Petite Arvine, Cornalin and Humagne Rouge, which are rarely found abroad.

The smart resorts, above all Zermatt, St Moritz and Gstaad, have a dense layer of ambitious and very expensive cooking. Ticino adds rustic grotti serving polenta and Merlot. The range stays narrow, though. There is little street food and no market culture to speak of, and in most villages the choice comes down to a few hotel dining rooms and stuben.

The heritage here is mostly built into the landscape. The Engadine has painted sgraffito houses in villages such as Guarda and Zuoz. The Rhaetian Railway's Albula and Bernina lines are World Heritage engineering. In Valais there are old larch-wood granaries on stone stilts. Sion has two hilltop castles, Valère and Tourbillon, facing each other above the old town. In Ticino, the three medieval castles of Bellinzona guard the valley.

The Benedictine convent of Müstair, near the Italian border, keeps Carolingian frescoes. Ballenberg, near Brienz, is a large open-air museum of rebuilt farmhouses from across the country. Davos and St Moritz have small museums for Kirchner and Segantini, the painters most tied to these mountains. It all makes for pleasant sightseeing. There is no great museum, though, and nothing that would bring a visitor here for culture alone.

Going out in the Alps means après-ski. It happens in winter, in a handful of resorts. Verbier has the loudest reputation, with slope-side terraces filling in the late afternoon and a few clubs open well past midnight in high season. Zermatt has a lively cluster of bars at the foot of the pistes. St Moritz and Gstaad offer a glossier, more expensive evening of hotel bars and members-style clubs.

Outside the ski season the resorts go quiet. Most villages, and the summer hiking bases, are asleep by eleven. Anyone who cares about nightlife should come in winter and stay in one of the big resorts.

This is one of the great mountain landscapes on earth, and it is unusually easy to use. In the Bernese Oberland, the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau rise above the cliff-walled Lauterbrunnen valley with its waterfalls. Valais has the Matterhorn above Zermatt, and the Aletsch, the longest glacier in the Alps. Graubünden has the wide, bright Engadine with its chain of lakes, and the Swiss National Park, where ibex and chamois are easy to spot.

Thousands of kilometres of marked trails start at cable-car stations and run between huts, so a hiker can reach high country without a full day's climb. In winter the big ski areas around Zermatt, Verbier, St Moritz and Davos are some of the best anywhere. Summer, from late June to September, brings paragliding, mountain biking, via ferratas and glacier tours with guides. The high passes open only when the snow clears.

The best base for days out is the Bernese Oberland, between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. From there, the arcaded old town of Bern is under an hour by train. Thun and its castle are closer still. Lucerne, with its wooden bridges and lakefront, is about two hours away on a scenic line over the Brünig Pass.

To the west, Gruyères is a walled cheese town on a hilltop. Beyond it lie the terraced Lavaux vineyards and the Château de Chillon on Lake Geneva. From Valais, Sion and the wine villages are close. From the south side of the Alps, Lugano, Locarno and the castles of Bellinzona make easy outings. Few of these places are famous in their own right, but there are many of them, and the trains make every one simple.

The Alps are easy with children, even though little here is built purely for them. Resorts such as Grindelwald, Wengen, Saas-Fee, Arosa and Lenzerheide run large ski schools with gentle nursery slopes in winter. In summer, the same lifts lead to theme trails, adventure playgrounds, summer toboggan runs and lakes for paddling. Cable cars, cogwheel trains and steamers on the lakes are a day out for a small child in themselves, and the open-air museum at Ballenberg has farm animals and old crafts.

The villages are safe, clean and quiet, and car-free resorts such as Zermatt and Wengen let children walk freely. What is missing is a big theme park, aquarium or zoo. Altitude and weather also need some care with very young children.

Hardly anywhere else are mountains this easy to reach without a car. Main-line trains, narrow-gauge railways, yellow postbuses, lake steamers and cable cars all run on connected timetables. Valley stations are timed to meet the lifts, and almost every village can be reached by public transport. Several resorts, Zermatt, Wengen, Mürren and Saas-Fee among them, ban private cars entirely, and the villages themselves are compact and easy to walk.

The limit is geography. Moving between the big regions, from the Bernese Oberland to the Engadine or from Zermatt to St Moritz, means a long day on winding lines and several changes. The famous panoramic trains are scenic precisely because they are slow. Choose one or two bases rather than touring everything.

The shopping here belongs to the resorts. St Moritz and Gstaad have short streets of luxury fashion and jewellery boutiques aimed at their wealthy winter guests. Zermatt and Interlaken have rows of watch and outdoor shops, the outdoor shops for serious mountain gear. Beyond these, the best things to bring home are edible or handmade. Look for alpine cheese bought from the dairy, Valais wine, Graubünden air-dried meat, woodcarving from Brienz and cowbells.

There are no department stores of note, few independent boutiques and no markets beyond village cheese stalls and Christmas markets. Anyone who wants real retail depth makes a day of it in a city.

The Swiss Alps are among the most expensive places in the world to vacation. Hotel rooms in Zermatt, St Moritz, Gstaad and Verbier, especially in the winter high season, are priced far above European norms. Even simple meals at mountain restaurants cost a great deal. The cable cars and mountain railways that make the region so accessible are expensive too, and a few high excursions can cost more than the hotel.

A visitor can soften the bill with self-catering apartments, supermarket picnics, hostels around Interlaken and multi-day travel passes. Quieter valleys such as Goms, Val Müstair or the Ticino side cost somewhat less. There is no cheap way to do the Alps.

Music in the Alps happens in summer, in festivals. The Verbier Festival in July brings top soloists and young orchestras to a ski resort's halls and tents for several weeks. The Menuhin Festival fills the churches of the Saanenland around Gstaad with chamber music and orchestras. Smaller classical festivals take place in Davos, the Engadine and Zermatt, often in village churches.

The rest of the year there is little to attend beyond village brass bands, yodelling and alphorn evenings, and occasional winter concerts in the larger resorts. There is no resident opera or theatre, so a visitor who wants a night at the opera or a play must go down to a city.

The Alps have a long tradition of taking the waters and the mountain air. Leukerbad, under sheer cliffs in Valais, is a whole village built around hot springs, with large public pools open to the snow in winter. Vals in Graubünden has its celebrated stone thermal bath, cut into the hillside. Bad Ragaz has drawn bathers to the Tamina gorge springs for centuries. Scuol in the Lower Engadine pairs mineral springs with Romansh villages.

Beyond the baths, the grand resort hotels of St Moritz, Gstaad and Zermatt have serious spas. The pace is restorative almost everywhere. Car-free villages, clean air, quiet nights and long views make the region one of the easiest places in the world to slow down.