Europe’s underrated capital city as beautiful as Paris or Rome but without the tourists

Tired of croweded Barcelona, Rome and Paris? There's one beautiful city that offers just as much but is never as busy.

The de facto capital of Switzerland, Bern is comparable with that of Paris or Rome, but is so underrated it welcomes far fewer tourists every year. It has 114 heritage sites of national significance, compared with just 13 in Rome, making it a fascinating city to explore this summer. 

Found 21 miles north of the Bernese Alps, the countryside around the city was formed by glaciers during the most recent ice age. The city was built on a hilly peninsula surrounded by the Aare - a major river on the Swiss Plateau - but outgrew its natural boundaries in the 19th-century. 

To allow the city to expand beyond the Aare, 18 bridges were built, including the Nydeggbrücke, which connects the eastern part of the old city with the new part. 

The city is built on very uneven ground, with elevation differences of up to 60 metres between the inner city districts and the higher ones, including Kirchenfeld. 

The total area of the city was 19.93 square miles as of 2013, with 33.3 percent forested, 2.1 percent rivers or lakes and 18.2 percent used for agricultural purposes. 

Bern is classed as having an oceanic climate, with the warmest month being July. At this time, mean daily temperatures are around 18.3℃ with a maximum daily temperature of 24.3℃. The average amount of snowfall in December is 14 centimetres. 

It is the fifth most populous city in Switzerland, with around 134,000 residents as of 2022, behind Zürich, Geneva, Basel and Lausanne. 34 percent of its residents are foreign nationals. Its official language is German spoken by 81.2 percent of the population, but the main spoken language is a local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect - Bernese German. The second most common language is Italy, at 3.9 percent.

In 1983, the historic old town - “Altstadt” in German - became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The entire town is one of the 114 heritage sites of national significance in the city. 

Key sites include the “Zytglogge”, or “Time Bell”, the 800-year-old elaborate medieval clock tower with moving puppets and the Federal Palace (“Bundeshaus”) which houses the national parliament, government and part of federal administration. The city’s cathedral, Bern Minster, which begun construction in 1421 is built in the Gothic style and houses a 100.6 metre tower, which was not completed until 1893. It is the tallest cathedral in the country. 

The 16th-century “Bärengraben”, or bear pit is also a popular tourist attraction, which houses the city’s heraldic animals. According to local legend, the founder of the city vowed to name the city after the first animal he met on the hunt, which turned out to be a bear. They are now kept in an open-air enclosure nearby and two other young bears, gifted by the Russian president, are kept in Dählhölzli zoo. 

Albert Einstein lived in a flat at Kramgasse 49 from 1903 to 1905 - now the site of the Einsteinhaus museum - when the Annus Mirabilis (“miracle year”) papers were published, which revolutionised science’s understanding of concepts of space, time, mass and energy. 

With four miles of arcades, the old town boasts one of the longest covered shopping promenades in Europe. Finally, the Rose Garden provides scenic panoramic views of the medieval town centre, which was converted into a park from a former cemetery in 1913. 

Bern is very well connected, both inside the city and to the rest of the country and Europe. In terms of public transport, it is home to a dense network of trains, trams, trolleybuses and regular buses and is also well-served by railways, including the extensive S-Bahn network, and motorways which connect it to other Swiss cities.

Bern Airport, located outside the city near the town of Belp, serves general aviation and charter flights. Zürich, Geneva and EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg serve as gateways for air traffic, all reachable in less than two hours by train or car from Bern.  

The city has also made efforts to make it the “bicycle city” of Switzerland through better infrastructure including dedicated cycle paths and bike-sharing facilities. 

On Tripadvisor, Bern, particularly the old town, has been described by visitors as “beautiful and well maintained” as well as “Its calmness, [red-roofed] medieval buildings, long cobbled streets, colourfully painted fountains, and the beautiful and elegant clock towers, have made this Old Town be possibly the most pretty & best-preserved Historic Town in Switzerland”.