Tourist guide offers travels into “Belle Epoque”

The Montreux Palace is a well-maintained example of Belle Epoque architecture. www.montreux-palace.com

Swiss masterpieces of the Belle Epoque - hotels, restaurants, and railways from the golden age of the late 19th century - are the stars in a new leaflet published by an association that promotes arts tours in Switzerland.

The publication by Vereinigung Kunsttourismus Schweiz (association of arts tourism Switzerland), which fits easily into travellers’ pockets with its 20 pages and narrow format, is aimed at individual travellers as well as tour operators specialising in theme trips. It details sites in three areas of Switzerland, which can be combined into tours of up to one week each.

The illustrated leaflet, “A Visit to Masterpieces of the Belle Epoque in Switzerland”, falls into two parts. The first part explains artistic, architectural and social aspects of the Belle Epoque (or fin-de-siècle) period, which lasted from 1860 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and their relevance in Switzerland.

The second part gives short descriptions and contact numbers of the sites detailed – museums, hotels, restaurants and coffee houses, baths, railways and steamers in the three regions suggested for travel routes (Zurich and Lucerne, Graubünden and Ticino, Bern and French speaking Switzerland).

Speakers at a promotional presentation of the idea this week in Zurich dwelt on Switzerland’s disadvantage in presenting itself as a destination for tourists interested in the arts as well as for those who come to see the landscape.

Regional tourism

“In comparison with the metropolitan cities in Europe, individual Swiss cities have not enough cultural highlights to offer in the views of many to justify a trip”, said the director of ATS, Dieter Pfister. “To be competitive, we have to offer regional tours that combine sites in different cities.”

The Belle Epoque was the time when tourism in Switzerland took off. Many hotels of that period have survived – the most beautiful of which are represented in the tours suggested in the leaflet -, which were built for Europe’s newly rich bourgeoisie whose fashion it had become to spend a Swiss holiday.

The texts in the loosely arranged guide – it makes no suggestions for itineraries – deal with the Belle Epoque’s escapist taste for spectacular building sites on lakesides and in the mountains. They also explain the Belle Epoque styles in architecture, interiors and manners in the context of the eagerness of the new middle classes to imitate the aristocracies of old.

by Markus Haefliger

“A Visit to Masterpieces of the Belle Epoque in Switzerland”, which is available in German, French and English, can be ordered from Vereinigung Kunsttourismus Schweiz, [e-mail], phone [phone], Fax [phone].