Michael Portillo celebrates the majesty of the Swiss city and embraces the way the country works so hard for its visitors
The Reformation was begun in Zurich by a pastor called Huldrych Zwingli, whose severe statue now looms close to the city’s Grossmünster church. I am sure that he had sound objections to corrupt practices among the Catholic clergy, but his religious revolution introduced a few hundred years of Protestant Puritanism in Zurich that banned drink, dance, song and the display of saints.
Fortunately, nearby Baden, site of a spa used since Roman times, remained Catholic, and therefore relatively jolly; and fun-loving Zurichers headed there, claiming to need to take the waters, but in fact gasping for a noggin, a gavotte and a yodel. Today, the whole breadth of Niederdorfstrasse, running between 13th-century houses in the old town, is filled with restaurant tables and celebration, as modern Zurich raucously purges itself of those centuries of austerity.
Talking of cleansing, Zurich is adorned by 1,200 fountains, many medieval (their saint statues zealously felled long ago), and 400 of them fed by natural springs. Water is all around. The Limmat River flows through the city to the broad reaches of Lake Zurich, where the opera house and grand hotels bask in the sunshine of its so-called “gold coast”.
I am visiting in February, but the first wild swimmers have already taken the plunge. By summer, the lake shore will be crowded. It’s part of what gives Swiss lakeside cities such a high quality of life. For office workers, the daily routine includes a swim in the refreshing waters before the commute home.
Switzerland is a sort of public transport paradise. You will never find yourself far from a train, tram, bus or boat stop. Everything runs to time, of course. From Zurich station’s control tower I have watched the trains surge in and out, as predictably as the tides. In half-hour cycles, the services flow in, filling every platform. Look again moments later, and the trains are gone and the platforms have emptied. The identical pattern is repeated every 30 minutes and every day.
Most trains are operated by Swiss Federal Railways, but by no means all. About 250 private companies also run rail, boat and bus services. Yet a single travel pass (starting at 232 Swiss francs – £186 – for three days) covers national and private operators, and gains you entry to 500 museums, too. Ticket barriers scarcely exist, and much of the system relies, delightfully, on trust.
Switzerland is a country that works, and works hard for the visitor, because tourism is worth 50 billion Swiss francs annually. Nearly a quarter of a million Swiss make their living from the industry, and in rural areas it can be the mainstay of employment. Those of us whose currencies have weakened relentlessly against the Swiss franc find the country expensive. The Swiss understand our pain, and compensate by ensuring that travel is straightforward and reliable.
I stay at Zurich’s Dolder Grand. Resembling a fairy-tale castle, its original 1899 building has been embraced rather literally by two curved wings designed by Norman Foster, containing a vast spa. With a golf course and surrounded by wooded hills 200m above the lake, it’s hard to classify it as a city or country hotel. There’s no need to decide. It has, of course, its own railway, the Dolderbahn, which carefully lowers you down the cogged track into town, there to coordinate with the tram.
Trams are generally blue (the hue of the lake) and white, the colours of Zurich canton. But once a month, vintage rolling stock, dating to the 19th century, is released upon the public network. The vehicles are normally housed in the city’s tram museum, a former depot, which now echoes to the excited squeals of juvenile enthusiasts, rushing around a large collection of historic exemplars, all in fine condition. Aficionados have given up their weekends, over decades, to restore them to sparkling perfection. Those same volunteers monthly don the caps and tunics of yesteryear, and armed with historic ticket clippers, crew their trams along the modern tracks of the city.
I feel a need to visit the house that Vladimir Lenin lived in during the First World War, above a butcher’s shop, where he (cheekily) complained of the smells. I regard him as another cheerless insurrectionist, to compete with Zwingli. The Germans had the bright idea of allowing him to return to Russia, travelling across Germany in a sealed train, like a virus. The metaphor is apt. On arrival in St Petersburg, he unleashed a revolutionary pandemic that deposed and murdered the tsar, and withdrew Russia from the war with Germany. As he invented the Soviet Union, Lenin’s rail journey has my vote for being the most significant in history.
I look in at the Odeon Cafe, beautifully preserved since it first opened its doors in 1911. Lenin was here; and Benito Mussolini and Albert Einstein also enjoyed its coffee and free newspapers. James Joyce was a devotee too, poring over street directories and maps of Dublin, as he wrote Ulysses, to ensure that his novel was totally accurate in describing his native city.
It’s time for another train journey or two. The Polybahn is a funicular built out of pity for the students who had to toil up the hill to the university and polytechnic (or maybe for their professors). A fine terrace in front of the varsity buildings gives you a splendid view over many spires and towers. Little remains, beyond a chunk of masonry and the vestiges of a bathhouse, to mark the Roman settlement of 15 BC; and even the 13th-century walls were swept away because of an egalitarian fervour to remove barriers between urban citizens and farmers.
It’s an easy journey from Zurich to Lausanne in French-speaking Switzerland; and as the train nears the city, I witness a spectacular sunset across Lac Léman. The Romans settled on the shore at Lausanne a little after Zurich, but the medieval population lived well above the water, where the cathedral of Our Lady still dominates the skyline. A statue of the Virgin was decapitated during the Reformation and whitewash applied to the lovely colours of its interior. But its Gothic splendour survives, and by long tradition a night watchman in its tower, on the lookout for fires, still calls out that all is well.
Villas and hotels developed on the shore in the 19th century. During la Belle Époque, paddle steamers with stylish elongated prows were introduced on the lake; and recently some have been impeccably restored, their polished wooden benches gleaming. The vessels still run on steam, but now a heat exchanger, rather than coal, is used to boil the water.
After the railway first sliced through the city, it became fashionable to live “sous la gare” because the views remained unspoilt. So the city now spreads from the heights to the water.
Life in Lausanne must be dominated by the gradient. Nothing is flat, it seems. Certainly streets are so vertiginous that they turn into staircases of stone; or of wood, in which case they are picturesquely protected from rain and snow by long pitched roofs.
A few days of sightseeing will make you thoroughly fit, and you’ll develop admirable calf muscles. But, this being Switzerland, public transport is also at hand. The top and bottom of Lausanne were once connected by a funicular, and now by what has to be the world’s steepest metro. Even the platforms drop sharply and disconcertingly from north to south.
Alighting at Lausanne’s imposing station, my rail pass is valid on the metro, and having just a small suitcase, I board it; and my train slides down the slope towards the lake. I disembark halfway to the water, to enter the Royal Savoy, another hotel with fantastical turrets, first built at the beginning of the twentieth century. It has been thoroughly modernised and now includes a 1500 square metre spa. My balcony gives me inviting views of the shimmering Lac Léman.
The removal of tracks that ran between solid-built warehouses has created a new area of shops and restaurants, the Quartier Flon, that teems at night. Recently the Federal Railway disposed of an old engine shed by the main station, and this has become the new art quarter of Lausanne, called Plateforme 10, where two strikingly innovative buildings, trackside, are the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts and the Photo Elysée.
You might detect a certain fixation with railways in this account of Switzerland. I accept that, but I would plead that trains have done much to bring and hold together the Swiss Confederation’s four linguistic groups, and they have shaped its cities and communications. In an age when we seek to be greener, its reliable railways enable us to enjoy the whole country without any need for the internal combustion engine.
Read about the rest of Michael’s trip where he tries out ‘Excellence Class’ aboard the Glacier Express, passing through picturesque villages and skirting ski slopes before dining on local food and wine sourced along the route.
Switzerland is easily reachable via train from London or by Swiss International Air Lines. And once you land, the famously efficient public transport will take you the regions you want to visit by train, bus or boat using the Swiss Travel Pass, available from the Switzerland Travel Centre.
For more on Zurich visit zuerich.com
And for more on Lausanne go to lausanne-tourisme.ch
Discover more Swiss cities for yourself at MySwitzerland.com/cities and book your package at switzerlandtravelcentre.com/city-break