Interlaken is often dismissed as the touristy town good only for excursions in the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the glorious Jungfrau region. Our Jim Johnson says otherwise.

By Jim Johnson

For most travelers, Interlaken is a base from which to enjoy the nearby mountain villages and alpine scenery of Switzerland’s Jungfrau region. This correspondent, however, though delighted by the villages and the mountains, became enthralled with Interlaken itself - its history, its architecture, its charm (much of it hidden) and its lack of pretense.

This conclusion was reached during six December days spent walking through back streets, narrow alleys and pleasant hiking paths in and around the town. Just behind my hotel, I explored the empty grounds of Interlaken’s 14th-century castle. A five-minute walk away in Matten, once home to the area’s patrician farmers, I stared down cows and listened to farmers yodel while loading hay into a 400-year-old hut. In Unterseen, the oldest part of Interlaken, I walked past centuries-old mills and canals, factories from the days of the Industrial Revolution, the town’s 17th-century palace, and a medieval moat that once protected the 500-year-old houses that line it.

A short distance along the Lake Brienz shoreline is Bönigen, once just a farming community but for more than a century now an active lakefront resort complete with ship landing, beaches and 19th-century hotels as well as farms and medieval houses. Across the lake looms the towering ruins of the 13th-century Ringgenberg Castle.

In the nearby village of Wilderswil, a well-marked trail flows around and through the village, past a collection of medieval houses built around a square. A covered bridge, circa 1738, crosses the Lütschine River to a 12th-century church and the 600-year-old Gasthaus Steinbock. It’s but a short climb to the medieval farming village of Gsteigweiler where there’s nary a hotel nor restaurant.

In Interlaken’s very center is the Höhenweg, a wide promenade along the Höhematte, a 35-acre meadow set aside in 1864 where no trees can be felled, no buildings constructed, and the land can’t be divided. However, once a year, when the farmers lead their cows from the mountains, the pasture takes on its old purpose as a holding area for cattle.

Those who enjoy historic architecture could devote an entire vacation to Interlaken. Beyond the medieval buildings, Interlaken is a collection of treasures from the mid-19th-century Industrial period through early 20th-century Jugendstil.