Historians say Lucerne in central Switzerland sprouted up around a Benedictine monastery, founded in 750AD as a cell of the powerful Murbach Abbey in Alsace, now part of France. Yet there is a far more romantic origin tale for the city, involving an angel beaming a light from the sky to show the first settlers where to build the first chapel. It grew from there into a small fishing town.
Standing on the city’s edge, looking at the ice-blue glitter of Lake Lucerne, the emerald hills across the way and the alabaster peaks of the Alps in the distance, I’ve no idea why the settlers would have needed divine directions. They could have just used their eyes. Perching at the point where the River Reuss flows out of the lake, and even in a country with more than its fair share of stunning landscapes, Lucerne is a showstopper.
The pioneers of tourism saw it. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when it became fashionable for young aristocrats to criss-cross Europe on what they called “The Grand Tour”, Lucerne was on the list. And when package-tour pioneer Thomas Cook organised his first group foray to Switzerland in 1863, it ended in that city.
Several famous names have also visited through the ages and helped to boost its profile, most notably Queen Victoria, who went in 1868 on doctors orders to ride boats on the lake and walk (and occasionally ride her pony) up the mountains. The fanfare around her sojourn — and another two visits in later years — ignited a lust for Lucerne among the Brits, and a hotel-building craze to accommodate the wave. Many creatives went too, among them Mark Twain, Wagner, Goethe (he called it “a city of singular beauty”), Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway.
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