Payerne

Payerne is a small town of about 10,000 people in the Broye, the flat farming country between Lake Neuchâtel and Fribourg, and it contains a building far out of proportion to it.

The abbey church

The Abbatiale de Payerne is the largest and finest Romanesque church in Switzerland — an enormous eleventh-century building of pale stone, with a nave of great height and severity, carved capitals, and traces of the original painted decoration on the vaults.

It was a Cluniac priory, and its scale reflects that: Cluny was the most powerful monastic network in Europe, and Payerne was one of its major houses north of the Alps.

The building survived because it stopped being a church. After the Reformation it was used as a granary, a barracks, a prison and a fire station, which kept the roof on and the structure intact while more prestigious churches were rebuilt in later styles. A long restoration, completed in 2020, has returned it to something close to its original state.

The frescoes in the apse and the carved capitals are the things to look for. So is the sheer emptiness of the interior, which the reformers left bare and which suits the architecture.

Queen Bertha

The abbey was founded around 962 by Bertha of Burgundy, queen consort and later regent, who is one of the few figures of the period with a folk memory attached in Switzerland: she is remembered as riding around her lands spinning wool, and le temps où Berthe filait — the time when Bertha spun — is still a French phrase for a lost golden age.

She is buried in the church. Her sarcophagus is there, and the saddle said to be hers is in the museum.

The air base

Payerne’s other identity is military. The air base here is the main operational base of the Swiss Air Force, and the town is used to fast jets overhead.

It is also where Solar Impulse, the solar-powered aircraft that flew round the world without fuel, was built and first flown, in 2009–2010. Bertrand Piccard’s project used Payerne as its home field, which continues a certain family tradition — his grandfather Auguste took a balloon into the stratosphere in 1931, and his father Jacques went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

The Broye

The countryside around is flat, agricultural and entirely un-alpine — market gardens, tobacco fields and cycling. It is also where a good deal of Swiss vegetable production happens, which the rest of the country notices mainly in supermarket labels.

Avenches, Roman Aventicum and once the capital of Helvetia, is ten minutes away; see Roman Switzerland.

Getting there

• By train — Fribourg 25 minutes, Lausanne 45 minutes, Bern about an hour.
• On foot — the abbey is five minutes from the station.

When to go

Any time; the church is the visit and it is indoors. It is worth combining with Avenches and Murten, both within twenty minutes, for a day in a part of Switzerland that almost no foreign visitor reaches.