Lungern

Lungern is a village that argued with its own lake for the better part of fifty years before making peace with it. From 1790 the community was split between the "Nassen" and the "Trockenen," the wets and the dries, over whether to drain part of the lake for pasture. The dries won. On 9 January 1836, a tunnel driven through the rock at Kaiserstuhl was finally blasted open, and the water dropped by around 35 metres, exposing close to 170 hectares of new grazing land. Houses and farms now stand where the lake used to reach.

What remains is still striking. The water runs clear and mineral blue, warm enough by midsummer for swimming, ringed by a footpath that circles the shore at an easy, unhurried pace. Bicycles can be hired at the station for the same loop.

Above the village, a cable car climbs almost 800 vertical metres in under six minutes to Turren, at 1,562 metres. The ascent is fast, but what it leads to is not. A high plateau of dry meadows where, between June and August, close to a hundred species of butterfly settle on the grass, and a ridge walk that opens onto the Bernese Alps, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau lined up along the horizon. In winter the same slopes turn into quiet ski touring and snowshoe terrain.

The old church tower near the lakeshore, the only part left standing after a mudslide destroyed the original church in 1887, now holds a staircase of 78 steps to a small viewing platform. From the top, the lake sits exactly where the village decided it should.