Neuchâtel

Neuchâtel is built out of a local yellow limestone, which gives the whole old town a warm ochre colour unlike anywhere else in Switzerland — Alexandre Dumas described it as a town carved out of butter, and the description has followed it ever since.

It sits on the largest lake entirely inside Switzerland, in the French-speaking west. Local pride holds that the purest French in the country is spoken here, and the claim is repeated often enough that it may as well be true.

The old town

Compact, steeply stacked and almost entirely in that yellow stone.

At the top sit the castle and the collegiate church together. The castle is twelfth-century, still the seat of the cantonal government, and free to walk into. The church next to it holds the cenotaph of the Counts of Neuchâtel — fifteen painted figures from 1372, the most important Gothic monument of its kind north of the Alps.

Below, the Maison des Halles stands in the market square, and the streets are punctuated by fountains, of which the Fontaine du Banneret is the one to find.

The automata

The single most remarkable thing in the town, and hardly anyone outside Switzerland has heard of it.

In the 1770s Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son built three clockwork figures: a boy who writes any text of up to forty characters, a draughtsman who draws four different pictures, and a musician who plays a real organ, follows her fingers with her eyes and breathes.

They still work. They are in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, and they are demonstrated on the first Sunday of the month. The writer is programmable by a set of cams — which is why they are routinely described as the ancestors of the computer, and why the museum is worth timing a visit around.

The lake

Lac de Neuchâtel is 38 km long, the largest lake wholly within Switzerland, and much quieter than Geneva or Lucerne. Boats run along it and through canals to the neighbouring lakes of Biel and Murten — the three-lakes cruise is a full and pleasant day.

The shore is flat, which makes the lakeside cycle path easy, and the southern side is a nature reserve of marshland and reeds full of birds.

Above the town: watch country

The Jura rises behind Neuchâtel, and the valleys up there are where the modern watch industry was made. La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, half an hour up, are UNESCO World Heritage — not for beauty but for town planning: both burned down and were rebuilt on a strict grid designed around watchmaking workshops, with streets aligned to bring daylight into the benches.

Le Corbusier was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and the town has several of his early buildings.

The Musée International d’Horlogerie there is the serious watch museum of Switzerland.

Further along the valley is the Val-de-Travers, where absinthe was invented in the 1790s, banned in 1910, distilled illegally for most of a century, and legalised again in 2005. The distilleries are open to visitors and take the history lightly.

Getting there

• By train — Zurich about an hour and a half, Bern 35 minutes, Geneva an hour and a quarter.
• By boat — from Biel and Murten in season.

What to eat and drink

The lake fish, particularly perch fillets. The local white wine is Chasselas, as in Lavaux, and the region also makes Œil-de-Perdrix, a pale rosé of Pinot Noir that was invented here.

And absinthe, which is served properly with a slotted spoon and iced water and is stronger than it tastes.

When to go

Late September for the Fête des Vendanges, the wine harvest festival — the largest autumn festival in Switzerland, with a corso of flowers and several hundred thousand visitors in a town of 33,000.

Otherwise May to October. Winter has its own argument: the ochre stone under snow, and the lake fogs that leave the Jura above in sunshine.