Watch surfers ride a standing wave in the middle of town, created by a wooden gate from 1818.
Schadau castle
A summer house dressed as a castle, with a park to match its ambition.
Schadau Castle rises where the Aare leaves Lake Thun, in a park first recorded in 1348. Denis Alfred de Rougemont, a banker from Neuchâtel, built the current house between 1846 and 1854 as a summer residence for himself and his wife Sophie de Pourtalès. The architect James Victor Colin, trained in Paris, gave it French feudal towers and English Tudor Gothic windows. Sandstone carvings run across every façade, restored stone by stone by the city's own quarrymen between 1972 and 1992.
The city of Thun has owned the castle since 1925. Its rooms now hold the Swiss Gastronomy Museum, and one wall carries the oldest surviving panorama painting anywhere: Marquard Wocher's 1814 view of an ordinary morning in Thun, before photography existed to do the job faster. The park outside, 3.6 hectares laid out in the English style, has stood open to anyone since 1860.
The castle sits a fifteen-minute walk from Thun station along the river, or a few stops on bus line 1 to Schadaupark. From the shoreline path out front, the Bernese Alps sit directly across the water, unblocked by anything.
