Gruyères

Gruyères is a single cobbled street running up a hill to a castle, with mountains on every side and no cars anywhere. It has about 2,200 residents in the wider commune and perhaps a million visitors a year, and it survives that ratio better than it has any right to.

It is in the French-speaking part of canton Fribourg, an hour from Bern, and it does three quite different things well.

The castle

The Château de Gruyères stands at the top of the street, built from 1270 and home to nineteen counts of Gruyère until the last of them went bankrupt in 1554 and the lands were divided between Fribourg and Bern.

Inside: a Burgundian tapestry collection, painted rooms from the nineteenth-century restoration, and a good view over the Sarine valley from the ramparts. The garden was laid out in the French style and is the quietest corner of the town.

The cheese

Le Gruyère AOP has been made in this valley since at least 1115, and the protected name means it can only be made here and in a handful of neighbouring districts.

La Maison du Gruyère, at the bottom of the hill by the station, is a working dairy with a visitor gallery: production runs several times a day, and you watch the milk turn into a 35 kg wheel through the glass. The tasting includes three ages of it — the difference between six months and eighteen is the point of the visit.

Note for the pedantic: Gruyère has no holes. The cheese with holes is Emmentaler, from a different valley entirely.

H. R. Giger

And then the other thing.

Hans Ruedi Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the creature and the sets for Alien and won an Oscar for it, bought a medieval building on the castle square in 1998 and put his museum in it. Across the street is the Giger Bar, fitted out in the same biomechanical vertebrae — vaulted ceiling, skeletal chairs, the lot.

Fondue and Alien within fifty metres of each other is an entirely Swiss juxtaposition, and the town is unbothered by it.

Chocolate at Broc

Ten minutes down the valley is Maison Cailler at Broc, the chocolate factory, where the tour ends in a room where you may eat as much as you like. It is aimed squarely at families and it works.

The Chocolate Train from Montreux, in season, does Broc and Gruyères together in a day with a panoramic carriage — see the panoramic trains.

Getting there

• By train — Bern about an hour and a half with a change at Bulle; Montreux about an hour and a half over the Col de Jaman; Geneva about two hours.
• The town is car-free. Park at the bottom by the dairy and walk up — it takes five minutes.
• Timing — coaches arrive from mid-morning. Come early or stay late; the street belongs to about six people at eight in the morning.

What to eat

Fondue moitié-moitié — half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois, which is the Fribourg way and the best version of it. Also soupe de chalet, and double cream from the valley served with meringues and berries, which is as heavy as it sounds and worth it.

Nearby

• Broc — the chocolate factory, ten minutes
• Fribourg — 40 minutes, and a city on the language border
• Charmey — a spa village in the next valley with thermal baths
• The ten most beautiful towns — Gruyères is on the list, at number six