The museum that explains why Interlaken exists

A town built on a monastery, then rebuilt on a view

Interlaken has no particular natural resource, no port, no historic industry. What it has is a name — inter lacus, between the lakes — and a location wedged onto the Bodeli, the flat strip of land separating Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. For roughly four centuries that location was defined by an Augustinian monastery, founded around 1130. For the last two centuries it has been defined by tourism. The Touristik-Museum der Jungfrau-Region, a small volunteer-run museum in Unterseen’s old town, is where those two facts connect, and it is one of the few places in the region that explains why a town of under 6,000 people ended up with hotels the size of small cities.

This is not a headline attraction. It will not appear on anyone’s list of unmissable things to do in Interlaken, and it should not — allow 45 to 60 minutes, and go because the subject interests you, not because a guidebook insists on it. But if you have wondered why the Hoheweg looks the way it does, why the Hohematte meadow is protected from development in the middle of prime real estate, or how a valley of farmers and monks became the gateway to the Jungfrau, this is the most direct answer available.

Where it is, hours and cost

The museum sits on Obere Gasse, the main street of Unterseen’s compact old town, a ten-minute walk from Interlaken West station across the River Aare. Unterseen is the older, quieter twin to Interlaken proper — wooden houses, a parish church tower, none of the tour buses — and the museum building itself, a former grain store, fits that character.

Detail	Information
Address	Obere Gasse, Unterseen old town
Nearest station	Interlaken West (10-minute walk)
Season	Typically May to October
Days	Tuesday to Sunday, afternoons
Admission	Single-digit CHF amount
Typical visit length	45–60 minutes

The museum is entirely volunteer-run, which means hours shift from year to year and it closes completely over winter. If you are planning a special trip rather than a passing visit, check the current calendar rather than relying on last year’s schedule — this is the kind of detail that changes without much notice.

What the collection actually covers

The exhibits are arranged more or less chronologically, moving from the monastery era through the coaching age, the arrival of steamers on both lakes, the grand hotel boom, and the railway-building era that culminated in the Jungfraujoch tunnel. Expect period photographs, hotel ledgers, early tourist ephemera, engineering models of the region’s cable cars and rack railways, and displays on the guides and porters who made early Alpine tourism physically possible before funiculars existed. There is a section on the paddle steamers that still work Lake Thun and Lake Brienz today, and on the Brienz Rothorn’s steam rack railway, the last of its kind in Switzerland.

It is a text-heavy, object-based museum rather than an interactive one, closer to a well-organised local archive than a modern visitor centre. That makes it more rewarding if you already know a bit about the region’s geography — the Jungfraujoch, Schilthorn and Grindelwald names mean more once you have stood in front of the peaks — so it works well as a second or third day activity rather than an arrival-day orientation stop, and it is easy to combine with a wander through Unterseen’s old town itself.

Before the tourists: the Augustinian monastery

Interlaken’s origin point is the Kloster Interlaken, an Augustinian monastery founded around 1130 on the strip of land between the two lakes — hence the name. For nearly four hundred years it was the dominant institution on the Bodeli, holding land rights across the surrounding valleys and shaping settlement patterns that still show in the local parish boundaries.

The monastery’s run ended abruptly during the Bernese Reformation in 1528, when Bern’s authorities dissolved religious houses across the canton. The monastery buildings were repurposed as an administrative seat (a Bernese Landvogt, or bailiff, governed the district from here for over two centuries), and much of the complex was rebuilt over subsequent centuries.

What survives today sits directly beside the Hohematte, the protected meadow at the centre of modern Interlaken: the former monastery buildings now house cantonal government offices, not open to casual visitors, while the adjoining Schlosskirche (castle church) remains a working parish church and is the most visible physical trace of the original foundation. It is a low-key, easy-to-miss corner of the town centre, but it is the actual reason a settlement existed here at all before anyone came to look at mountains.

How the mountains became the point: the invention of Alpine tourism

For most of European history, the Alps were a barrier to be crossed as quickly as possible, not scenery to be sought out. That attitude shifted gradually across the late 1700s under the influence of Romantic ideas about sublime landscapes, and the Bernese Oberland was one of the places where the shift became commercially visible earliest.

Early visitors were a trickle of wealthy northern Europeans, often British, extending their Grand Tour beyond Italy into the Alps for scenery rather than culture. Byron toured the region in 1816 and wrote about the Staubbachfall and the Jungfrau in terms that circulated widely back home; Mendelssohn and other cultural figures passed through in the following decades. By the 1850s this had become a recognisable pattern rather than a novelty: British travellers in particular arrived in growing numbers specifically to see the Jungfrau massif from Interlaken, and the town began building infrastructure to receive them rather than simply happening to be on their route.

Thomas Cook’s package tours, which began including Switzerland from the 1860s, accelerated this from individual travel into organised mass tourism — still small by later standards, but structurally new. What had been an incidental stop on a wider itinerary became a destination in its own right, and Interlaken’s economy pivoted accordingly, from farming and small trade on the Bodeli toward hospitality almost within a single generation.

The grand hotel era on the Hoheweg

The physical evidence of that pivot is the Hoheweg, the boulevard running along the edge of the Hohematte meadow, lined historically with grand hotels built specifically to face the protected green space and, beyond it, the view toward the Jungfrau. The Hohematte itself — 14 hectares of meadow now used as a paragliding landing zone in summer — was kept undeveloped precisely because the hotel owners along the Hoheweg wanted an unobstructed view preserved between their buildings and the mountains. It is a rare case of 19th-century commercial self-interest producing a public green space that still benefits everyone walking through the town today.

The Victoria-Jungfrau, opened in stages from 1865, is the clearest survivor of this era and still operates as a five-star hotel on the same site and largely the same footprint. Other Hoheweg hotels from the period have been rebuilt, converted or replaced over the following century and a half, so the street today is a mix of original and reconstructed buildings, but the overall pattern — grand facades set back from a protected meadow, purpose-built for a mountain view — dates directly from this boom.

The hotel era and the railway era that followed were not separate developments; they fed each other. Hotels needed guests who could reach the mountains they had come to see, and the profits from hotel-era tourism helped finance the extraordinary engineering projects that followed: the Wengernalp railway, the Schynige Platte rack railway of 1893, and ultimately the Jungfrau railway, tunnelled through the Eiger and completed in 1912 to reach 3,454 metres — still the highest railway station in Europe. The museum’s railway models and financing documents make this cause-and-effect relationship more concrete than it is from simply riding the trains today.

Combining the museum with the rest of Unterseen

Because the museum is small, it pairs naturally with the rest of Unterseen rather than standing as a destination on its own. The old town’s parish church tower, one of the oldest structures on the Bodeli, is a short walk away, and the riverside path along the Aare back toward Interlaken West gives a good sense of the flat, lake-pinched geography that shaped where the monastery, and later the town, could be built at all. If you want a wider view over the same terrain the museum describes, Harder Kulm, reached by funicular from Interlaken Ost in eight minutes, puts the Bodeli, both lakes and the hotel-lined Hoheweg into a single frame.

For a broader look at the built environment of Bernese life beyond Interlaken itself, the open-air Ballenberg museum’s reconstructed farmhouses cover the rural side of the same centuries the Touristik-Museum treats from the hotel-and-railway angle — the two make a reasonable historical pairing if you have a full day free for it, and Ballenberg is easily reached from Interlaken Ost.

Anyone drawn to the ruins-and-history angle of the region rather than the peaks can also cover a wider spread of the Bodeli’s older sites on a guided e-bike route through Interlaken’s lakes and older landmarks, which takes in viewpoints and remnants that are easy to miss on foot in a short visit.

Is it worth your time?

Judged purely against the region’s headline attractions, no: nobody should skip the Jungfraujoch or a Lake Brienz boat trip to fit this in. Judged as a low-cost, low-effort way to understand what you are looking at for the rest of your trip, it earns its 45 minutes. It costs a few francs, needs no booking, and directly answers a question most visitors do not think to ask until they are standing on the Hoheweg wondering why a small Swiss town has hotels that look like they belong in a much bigger city.

It works best slotted into a day that also covers Unterseen’s old town and possibly Harder Kulm or a walk along the Aare, rather than as a stand-alone outing, and it is realistically a rainy-day or rest-day activity — see things to do in Interlaken when it rains for other options that pair with it on a grey day. If your schedule in Interlaken is already tight, see how many days in Interlaken you actually need and where a museum visit like this one fits against the mountain excursions competing for the same afternoon.

For visitors staying a little longer and interested in the wider cultural picture of the region, Bern’s Zentrum Paul Klee and other museums are under an hour away by train and offer a very different, higher-production-value museum experience if the Touristik-Museum leaves you wanting more depth. Closer to home, the Brienz woodcarving and violin-making tradition is another strand of regional craft history worth an afternoon, and those planning wider day trips can check day trips from Interlaken for how a museum morning combines with an excursion afternoon.

If cost is a factor in deciding what to prioritise, Interlaken travel costs and Interlaken on a budget put a museum ticket this cheap into context against the region’s much pricier mountain tickets, and Interlaken free things to do lists what else fills a low-cost afternoon nearby. Where to base yourself for a trip that includes stops like this one is covered in where to stay in Interlaken.

For a lighter, more active way to see the surrounding lakeside landscape rather than reading about its history indoors, an e-bike route out toward Iseltwald and the Giessbach falls covers ground that the monastery’s monks and the first Victorian tourists alike would have crossed on foot or by boat, and a winter e-bike tour from Unterseen with a cheese stop is a practical way to see the old town itself in the low season when the museum is closed.

Frequently asked questions about the Touristik-Museum and Interlaken’s history

Where exactly is the Touristik-Museum and what are its opening hours?

It sits on Obere Gasse in Unterseen’s old town, a 10-minute walk from Interlaken West station across the Aare. It opens seasonally, typically May to October, Tuesday to Sunday afternoons, and is closed in winter — check the current calendar before a special trip, as hours change year to year and it is entirely volunteer-run.

How much does it cost to enter?

Admission is a modest single-digit CHF amount, cheaper than any mountain excursion in the region. It accepts cash and is one of the few things to do in Interlaken that will not dent a daily budget.

What is the connection between Interlaken and a monastery?

Interlaken takes its name from inter lacus, Latin for “between the lakes”, and it grew up around an Augustinian monastery founded around 1130 between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. The monastery was dissolved during the Bernese Reformation in 1528; its former buildings now house cantonal offices next to the Hohematte, and its church survives as the Schlosskirche.

When did Interlaken become a tourist destination?

The shift began in the late 1700s and accelerated after 1800, when British and other northern European travellers on the Grand Tour started detouring into the Bernese Oberland for Alpine scenery rather than treating the Alps as an obstacle to cross. Byron passed through in 1816; by the 1850s and 1860s, organised Alpine tourism and the first grand hotels were established.

Which grand hotels from that era still exist on the Hoheweg?

The Victoria-Jungfrau, opened in stages from 1865, is the survivor and still operates as a five-star hotel facing the Hohematte. Several other 19th-century hotel buildings along the Hoheweg have been converted, rebuilt or replaced, but the street’s grand, park-facing layout dates from this period.

Is the Touristik-Museum suitable for children?

It is a text-and-object museum aimed at adults with an interest in local history, not an interactive experience for children. Families with young children generally get more out of Ballenberg open-air museum or the Jungfrau railway itself than this collection.

Does the museum explain the Jungfrau railway too?

Yes, it covers the engineering and financing of the region’s early cable cars and rack railways, including the Jungfrau railway that opened in 1912, as part of the same tourism story — the railway building boom followed directly from the hotel boom that preceded it.