Switzerland: Engineering,
Applied to Mountains

All Destinations › Europe › Switzerland

Forty-eight peaks over 4,000 metres, a railway to the highest station in Europe, and villages where cars are simply not allowed.

Switzerland has taken the position that if a mountain is worth looking at, there should be a way to get to the top of it, and has spent a century and a half proving the point. The Jungfrau Railway climbs inside the Eiger and the Mönch to terminate at 3,454 metres, the highest railway station in Europe. The Pilatus cogwheel line runs at a gradient of 48 per cent, the steepest in the world. The cable car above Zermatt reaches 3,883 metres.

The result is a country where world-class alpine landscape is genuinely accessible — the Aletsch Glacier, 23 kilometres of it, seen without a rope; the Matterhorn from a village where the only vehicles are electric; and the Lauterbrunnen Valley, a glacial trench with 300-metre cliffs and 72 waterfalls coming off them.

At Finders & Keepers Safaris we travel Switzerland entirely by first-class rail, including the GoldenPass panoramic service, which is an experience rather than a transfer. We book the summit railways in advance and keep enough flexibility in the schedule to move a high mountain day to the clearer forecast — because the Jungfraujoch in cloud is an expensive way to see fog.