Top Things to Do in Interlaken

A local photographer who has spent years understanding Interlaken's light, angles, and seasonal rhythms takes you to the spots that never appear in standard travel coverage. This is less a sightseeing tour and more a tutorial in how to see a place: which corner of the Höhematte frames the Jungfrau against the most interesting foreground, where to stand on the Brienzersee shore when the morning light turns the water copper and rose, how the old quarter of Unterseen reads in late afternoon when long shadows fall across its wooden house fronts.

This private tour builds an arc through three of the Bernese Oberland's most dramatically different water environments: the broad, cold surface of one of the lakes flanking Interlaken, the close darkness of a limestone gorge where the sound of rushing water fills every cavity and makes conversation nearly impossible, and the open air beside a major alpine waterfall whose spray you feel on your face from close range. A private guide means the pace adapts completely to your group, longer at the gorge if the geology interests you, slower at the waterfall if the light is doing something worth watching.

Arriving at a working alpine dairy farm above Interlaken, the smell of warm milk and wood smoke, the sound of cattle moving in the barn below, the rough-hewn wooden beams of a building that has been standing for generations, is one of those experiences that makes the word authentic feel earned for once. This workshop takes you through the actual cheese-making process as practiced in the Bernese Oberland: heating, curdling, pressing, and the tasting that follows, where the difference between fresh curds and aged alpine cheese becomes something you understand through your palate rather than a label.

Running off a hillside above the Interlaken valley and rising into the thermals is a physical experience that rearranges your understanding of the landscape you have been looking at from ground level. Strapped to an experienced pilot, you feel the wing fill above you, the ground drops away, and the valley opens: the two lakes visible simultaneously, the Aare threading between them like a turquoise ribbon, the Jungfrau now at eye level rather than overhead. The flight typically lasts long enough to move past the adrenaline of launch into something quieter, warm air rising off the valley floor in summer, the smell of altitude, Interlaken legible below as a coherent geography rather than a street grid.

This e-bike tour is structured around discovery rather than distance, the route takes in ruins of medieval fortifications above the valley, lake shores that most visitors access only by train, and viewpoints that require a short climb above the valley floor but reward the effort with perspectives on the Jungfrau massif that the town promenade cannot provide. The electric assist makes the gradients accessible without destroying your capacity to appreciate what is at the top. Guides narrate the history of the structures you pass, the castles and watchtowers that monitored the valley routes long before the railways arrived.

The Jungfraujoch