When the Alps invented tourism

The meadow that stayed empty on purpose

I keep coming back to one fact about the Höheweg: the meadow in the middle of it, the Hohematte, has never been built on. Not because nobody wanted to build there — a flat 14 hectares in the middle of a tourist town is exactly the kind of land that gets a hotel or a shopping street. It stayed empty because the people running Interlaken in the 19th century understood, earlier than almost anywhere else in Europe, that the view was the product. Build across it and you’ve sold the thing you were selling. That single decision, repeated by each generation since, is why I can stand on the Höheweg today and see the Jungfrau exactly as the first English travellers described it two hundred years ago.

This is a personal essay, so I’ll say plainly what pulled me into this: I didn’t come to Interlaken for the paragliders landing on the Hohematte, though I watched a dozen of them drift down while I was writing notes for this piece. I came because I’d read that this unremarkable stretch of Bernese lowland between two lakes was, more or less, where the modern idea of mountain tourism got invented. Not climbing for science or conquest — that’s a different, slightly later story involving the Alpine Club and the Matterhorn. This is the older, gentler story of people travelling somewhere specifically to look at mountains, and an entire hospitality industry growing up around the looking.

Byron, and the poem that came out of a walking tour

In September 1816, Lord Byron came through the Bernese Oberland on a walking tour with his friend John Cam Hobhouse, keeping a journal as he went. He walked into Lauterbrunnen, saw the Staubbachfall dropping 297 metres past the church, and pushed on toward the Wengernalp with the north face of the Jungfrau above him.

The journal entries are short and physical — glaciers, avalanches, the sound of the falls — and they went almost directly into the writing of Manfred, his verse drama about a man haunted on an Alpine crag. Byron was already famous. When famous poets described somewhere in gothic, sublime terms, wealthy English readers took note. Guidebook writers were quoting Byron’s Alpine journal well into the 1850s, essentially using a lord’s private notes as free advertising copy for the region.

Felix Mendelssohn came through a few years later, in 1822 and again in 1831, and did something quieter but just as effective: he sketched. His watercolours and pencil drawings of the lakes and peaks, along with letters home describing the light and the water, circulated among a different but overlapping audience — cultured, musical, not necessarily aristocratic. Between a poet dramatising the sublime and a composer sketching the picturesque, the Bernese Oberland had, by the 1830s, two distinct literary and artistic advertisements running in England at once, years before any hotel chain thought to market the place formally.

The hotels that followed the readers

Demand from readers is one thing; getting people here in comfort is another. Through the 1830s to 1850s, the trip to Interlaken from England still meant crossing by boat, then travelling overland by coach or on foot, often for the better part of a week. What changed everything was the railway. Bern got its rail connection through in the 1850s to 1860s, and the line into Interlaken itself followed, cutting the last stretch from a day’s coach ride to under an hour. Thomas Cook ran his first organised tour of Switzerland in 1863, with the Bernese Oberland on the route, and that mattered more than any single guidebook: it meant a middle-class English family, not just the aristocracy, could book a fixed-price trip that included Interlaken.

The hotels arrived to match. The string of grand buildings that still lines the Höheweg — the Victoria, later merged into the Victoria-Jungfrau, and its neighbours — mostly dates from the 1860s through the 1890s, built specifically to face the Hohematte and the Jungfrau beyond it. The Kursaal, the casino and concert venue near the eastern end of the Höheweg, opened in this same window, giving wealthy guests somewhere to be seen in the evenings once the mountain-gazing was done for the day. None of this was accidental town planning. It was tourism infrastructure, built with the same deliberateness a modern resort would use, just with more stucco.

I’d recommend anyone curious about this period spend half an hour in the Touristik-Museum der Jungfrau-Region, which holds hotel ledgers, early printed guidebooks and railway ephemera from exactly this era. It’s a small museum and an easy add-on to a Höheweg walk, and it’s the closest thing Interlaken has to a plaque explaining why the town looks the way it does.

The railway that turned looking into riding

Everything up to this point is the story of people travelling to look at mountains from below. The next chapter is about the Jungfrau railway, which broke ground in 1896 and reached the Jungfraujoch at 3,454 metres in 1912, tunnelling much of its route through the rock of the Eiger itself. It remains Europe’s highest railway station.

Before 1912, seeing the Jungfrau close up meant a serious mountaineering effort. After 1912, it meant buying a ticket. That’s as significant a shift as the arrival of the first hotels — it’s the moment Alpine tourism stopped being primarily observational and became experiential, a pattern every ski resort and cable car in the region has followed since, from Grindelwald to the Schilthorn above Mürren.

The Wengernalp railway, the cogwheel line that still climbs from Lauterbrunnen through Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg, predates the Jungfrau railway by a couple of decades and was itself part of this same wave — get the trains built, and the mountains stop being an obstacle and start being the destination. If you want to feel that shift for yourself rather than just read about it, riding the line up is still the way to do it.

a full day trip from Interlaken up to the Jungfraujoch follows more or less the same route those first railway passengers took in 1912, minus the novelty and plus considerably more reliable heating.

What’s actually left today

Walk the Höheweg now and the layer of Victorian tourism is still legible if you know where to look: the hotel façades, the Kursaal, the Hohematte kept deliberately open, the Touristik-Museum two minutes off the main strip. What’s changed is who’s doing the arriving and why.

The paragliders landing on the Hohematte today are chasing thermals off the Harder Kulm and the Beatenberg ridge, not reading Byron. The Bernese Oberland’s tourism economy has diversified hugely since the 1860s — hiking, skiing, canyoning, e-biking — but the basic transaction Interlaken pioneered is unchanged: sell the view, protect the view, build the infrastructure to get people close enough to feel it.

If I have one honest complaint about visiting with this history in mind, it’s that the town doesn’t make much of it. There’s no dedicated Byron plaque, no interpretive panel on the Höheweg explaining why the meadow is empty. You have to already know to look for it, or read something like this beforehand. I’d rather that than the alternative — a manufactured “birthplace of tourism” experience with a gift shop attached — but it does mean the history here rewards curiosity more than it announces itself.

For a broader walking introduction to the town before or after digging into its history, an Interlaken walking tour with a cable car ride included covers the Höheweg and gives context a solo wander might miss. And if the railway story above has you wanting to see a working alpine line in the other direction, the Grindelwald First cable car and Bachalpsee hike shows the 21st-century version of the same idea: build the lift, open the mountain, let people arrive.

Interlaken and the invention of Alpine tourism: your questions

Did Lord Byron really visit Interlaken?

Byron toured the Bernese Oberland in September 1816, walking through Lauterbrunnen and past the Jungfrau. His Alpine journal fed directly into the drama Manfred, and his account was quoted in early guidebooks for decades afterwards.

What did Mendelssohn have to do with Interlaken?

Felix Mendelssohn passed through the region in 1822 and again in 1831, sketching and writing letters describing the lakes and peaks. He was one of several artists and composers whose accounts helped market the area to educated English readers.

When did the first grand hotels open on the Höheweg?

The Hotel Interlaken already existed by the early 1800s, but the string of large hotels lining the Höheweg dates mostly from the 1860s to 1890s, once the railway from Bern and Lucerne made the journey a day trip rather than an expedition.

How did the railway change tourism here?

Rail access to Interlaken arrived in stages from the 1860s, and the Jungfrau railway reached 3,454 metres in 1912. Journeys that once took days on foot or by mule became hours by train, and mountain viewing shifted from something earned to something purchased.

Is the Hohematte the same meadow travellers described 200 years ago?

Yes. The 14-hectare meadow between the Höheweg’s hotels has been kept free of building since the early 19th century specifically to preserve the view of the Jungfrau, which is why it is still open ground today, now doubling as a paragliding landing strip.

Where can I see this history today?

The Touristik-Museum der Jungfrau-Region in Interlaken has hotel ledgers, early guidebooks and railway memorabilia from the period. Walking the Höheweg itself, past the Victoria-Jungfrau and the Kursaal, is the other half of the visit.

Was Thomas Cook involved in Interlaken’s tourism boom?

Thomas Cook ran his first package tour to Switzerland in 1863, and the Bernese Oberland, with Interlaken as its base, was on the itinerary from early on. Cook’s tours normalised group Alpine travel for the English middle class, not just the wealthy.