Interlaken

Interlaken occupies the Bödeli, the alluvial plain that separates Lake Brienz from Lake Thun in the Bernese Oberland. The Aare crosses it from east to west over about four kilometres, from one body of water to the other, with two metres of fall between them. The town spreads over the flat left bank and reaches onto the right bank by a narrow strip that climbs at once into the Harder massif; a funicular runs up to the approaches of the Harder Kulm, at 1,321 metres, already in the neighbouring municipality of Unterseen. The municipal territory measures only 4.3 km², nearly half of it built up.

The municipality counted 6,123 inhabitants at the end of 2024. The 2013-2018 survey gives 49.6% of the area to housing and infrastructure, 22.7% to forest and 21.3% to farmland: flat ground is scarce here and largely taken. With Matten and Unterseen, its neighbours on the same plain, Interlaken forms the built-up whole of the Bödeli, with 14,424 inhabitants.

The buildings keep the stages. The former Augustinian priory became the bailiffs' residence after the Reformation; a castle went up beside it in 1748. Then came the series of grand nineteenth-century hotels, among them the Beau-Rivage, a neo-Renaissance palace built from 1872 to 1874 by the architect Horace Édouard Davinet. Two funiculars still leave the town, one for the Heimwehfluh, the other for the Harder Kulm.

Why this place is remarkable

Interlaken exists because of an accident of relief: four kilometres of flat ground caught between two lakes and two steep slopes, in a region that offers almost none. Everything follows from it — the siting of the monastery, the Latin name meaning between the lakes, the row of hotels, the convergence of railways towards the Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald valleys. It is a town whose main interest is what it opens onto, and it has known that for two centuries.

History and origin

Mountain tourism shaped the town in the nineteenth century. Travellers' accounts brought the Oberland into fashion, the hotels lined up, then the railway shortened distances: the Wengen line in 1893, the Jungfrau line from 1898 to 1912. The municipality changed its name in the same movement — Aarmühle until 1891, Interlaken thereafter, from the Latin phrase inter lacus inherited from the Augustinian monastery founded around 1130, around which the settlement had grown from the twelfth century. It was also in an Interlaken funicular that the mathematicians Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind met in 1874; set theory would come out of their collaboration.