Ensconced between a broad lake and the mountains, the people of Neuchatel in Switzerland seek solace in a life of fine wines, rich food and French TV
Commuting to Geneva from Biel for the SIHH watch exhibition every day for some five days was wonderful. The high-speed train raising its head through the greenery around the tracks, exposing us to a vast and an unending expanse of water and a city on its banks is a memory to be cherished. We would leave very early to reach the exhibition venue and return when the sun moved down on the West.
Every day, watching the vast expanse of water, I would tell my colleague, “We need to visit this place one day.” And my colleague would reply, “How do we snatch some hours?” Reaching the hotel early one April day we decided we would make it to Neuchatel getting up very early. “How early?” my colleague asked. Well, next day we were awake at 5.30 am and took the bus to Biel-Benne and were at Neuchatel station in 25 minutes.
Visiting Switzerland for last two years to attend the Basel and Geneva watch exhibitions, I had often come across the name Neuchatel for there are scores of watch manufactures located here. Fortifying ourselves with steaming milky coffee and a crisp croissant, we started our journey to discover the lake city we had admired all these days through the train window.
The city is located on the north-western shore of Lake Geneva a fewkilometres east of Peseux and west of Saint-Blaise. Above Neuchâtel,the roads and train tracks rise steeply into the folds and ridges of theJura Mountains. Remember I mentioned the train raising its head?
Neuchatel has a long history and gets its name from an incident that happened in 1011, the year Rudolf III of Burgundy presented a new castle (neu-châtel) on the lakeshore to his wife Irmengarde. It was the same year when Mahmud Ghazni captured the town of Thanesar in Punjab, plundered the inhabitants, destroyed the great temples, and broke the idols to pieces.
A small place with a population of 32,000 odd denizens, the Neuchatel town has an air of dignity and easy grace which is fuelled by a profusion of French-influenced architecture. Coming out of the station and reaching the town square it’s very likely you might think you’ve landed in France! In fact many of the 17th and 18th century buildings here are made from local yellow sandstone, a fact which led the famed writer of Don Quixote Alexandre Dumas to describe Neuchâtel as “a toy town carved out of butter.”
The Neuchâtelois (that’s what the locals are called) are the mostFrench-oriented in Switzerland, speaking a dialect of Swiss-French. The modern and disarmingly Gallic street life of pavement cafés and night bars, upscale street markets and hip designer boutiques has the slightly unreal flavour of a town actively seeking influences from beyond its own borders - a rare thing indeed in Switzerland. Ensconced between the broad lake and the mountains, the people here seek solace in a life of fine wines, rich food and French TV. Unlike in other Swiss cantons, in Neuchatel you’re likely to be greeted by a tricolour - green, white and red - with a minute Swiss cross hanging in the top corner flags.
The town’s main attractions are its café-lounging Gallic atmosphereand its location, with boats weaving to and fro across the lake andthe first ridges of the high Jura range standing poised over the town.The Old Town is extremely attractive and a random walk through its steep alleys are as good a way as any to appreciate the golden beauty of the architecture, as well as the 140-odd street fountains, a handful of which date from the sixteenth century.
The highlights of the Old Town are poised at the very top of the hill that’s accessed by the steeply winding Rue du Château. A two-minute walk east, on Rue de l’Hôpital, is the grand 1790 Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall), designed by Louis XVI’s chief architect Pierre-Adrien Paris. Neuchâtel has several excellent museums, including the Laténium, an archaeology museum focusing on the pre-historical times in Neuchâtel and Hauterive regions, particularly the La Tène culture. There’s also the MEN, an ethnography museum. But the flagship Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Esplanade Léopold-Robert, and its star attractions, the astonishing Automates Jaquet-Droz (Jaquet-Droz Mechanical Figurines) is not to be missed.
The Musée d’Art is worth going out of your for both for its innovative art collection, and for its set of charming eighteenth-century mechanical figurines which demonstrate in understated style the quite exceptional skills of the Neuchâtel watchmakers of the era. Instead of displaying works by period, artist, or genre, the collection is grouped by theme, with the various rooms labelled Nature, Civilization, The Sacred, and so on.
In an inspired piece of creative design harking back to earlier centuries, thecurators have crammed each room with art from floor to ceiling, with medieval still lives, contemporary abstractions, Impressionisticindulgences and others, thereby inducing the visitor to make dynamic connections between utterly distinct works. Interestingly, in each room you can climb podia - each one hung all round with paintings - in order to get a better view of the works hanging high on the four walls.
Still characterized by remote, windswept settlements and deep, rugged valleys, Neuchatel is also the heartland of the celebrated Swiss watch making industry which centred on the once-famous towns of LaChaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, both of which rely heavily on theirhorological past to draw in visitors.
In a country where cheese making is a cottage industry and fondue the national food, Neuchatel has its own variety: fondue Neuchâteloise. The city is also home to a small but active University and the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnologies (CSEM), located close to the lake. The lakeside has benches and tables where students can be seen poring over their textbooks shaded by a tree and lulled by the noise as the water slaps the stones and pebbles. Sitting on one of the benches with huge white swans for company, I prayed in my heart, “Oh God! In my next birth let me be born in Neuchatel and study at the local University.” If that was not possible, I reasoned with the Almighty, at least in my present life I would like my school-going daughter to be here to attend college.
We had been Neuchatel for two hours and it was time to rush to take the 8.20 a.m. train to Geneva. As we listened intently to the announcement made at the station while we waited for the train, my colleague asked, “Are you aware that bahnof is derived from the Hindi word vahan?” He went further, "Bahnof means a depot where vehicles arrive and leave for their destinations, just as Marathi Agar...Busagar.” Whether the German word has any relation to the Hindi word, considering that German is a conservative language unlike English which is progressive, the observation was amusing enough. But there was nothing stopping my friend, “Do you know Lufthansa is made of two words lupt (to disappear) hansa (swan)…”
Fortunately the train arrived, right on time as usual, to end our brief visit to Neuchatel.
Commuting to Geneva from Biel for the SIHH watch exhibition every day for some five days was wonderful. The high-speed train raising its head through the greenery around the tracks, exposing us to a vast and an unending expanse of water and a city on its banks is a memory to be cherished. We would leave very early to reach the exhibition venue and return when the sun moved down on the West.
Every day, watching the vast expanse of water, I would tell my colleague, “We need to visit this place one day.” And my colleague would reply, “How do we snatch some hours?” Reaching the hotel early one April day we decided we would make it to Neuchatel getting up very early. “How early?” my colleague asked. Well, next day we were awake at 5.30 am and took the bus to Biel-Benne and were at Neuchatel station in 25 minutes.
Visiting Switzerland for last two years to attend the Basel and Geneva watch exhibitions, I had often come across the name Neuchatel for there are scores of watch manufactures located here. Fortifying ourselves with steaming milky coffee and a crisp croissant, we started our journey to discover the lake city we had admired all these days through the train window.
The city is located on the north-western shore of Lake Geneva a fewkilometres east of Peseux and west of Saint-Blaise. Above Neuchâtel,the roads and train tracks rise steeply into the folds and ridges of theJura Mountains. Remember I mentioned the train raising its head?
Neuchatel has a long history and gets its name from an incident that happened in 1011, the year Rudolf III of Burgundy presented a new castle (neu-châtel) on the lakeshore to his wife Irmengarde. It was the same year when Mahmud Ghazni captured the town of Thanesar in Punjab, plundered the inhabitants, destroyed the great temples, and broke the idols to pieces.
A small place with a population of 32,000 odd denizens, the Neuchatel town has an air of dignity and easy grace which is fuelled by a profusion of French-influenced architecture. Coming out of the station and reaching the town square it’s very likely you might think you’ve landed in France! In fact many of the 17th and 18th century buildings here are made from local yellow sandstone, a fact which led the famed writer of Don Quixote Alexandre Dumas to describe Neuchâtel as “a toy town carved out of butter.”
The Neuchâtelois (that’s what the locals are called) are the mostFrench-oriented in Switzerland, speaking a dialect of Swiss-French. The modern and disarmingly Gallic street life of pavement cafés and night bars, upscale street markets and hip designer boutiques has the slightly unreal flavour of a town actively seeking influences from beyond its own borders - a rare thing indeed in Switzerland. Ensconced between the broad lake and the mountains, the people here seek solace in a life of fine wines, rich food and French TV. Unlike in other Swiss cantons, in Neuchatel you’re likely to be greeted by a tricolour - green, white and red - with a minute Swiss cross hanging in the top corner flags.
The town’s main attractions are its café-lounging Gallic atmosphereand its location, with boats weaving to and fro across the lake andthe first ridges of the high Jura range standing poised over the town.The Old Town is extremely attractive and a random walk through its steep alleys are as good a way as any to appreciate the golden beauty of the architecture, as well as the 140-odd street fountains, a handful of which date from the sixteenth century.
The highlights of the Old Town are poised at the very top of the hill that’s accessed by the steeply winding Rue du Château. A two-minute walk east, on Rue de l’Hôpital, is the grand 1790 Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall), designed by Louis XVI’s chief architect Pierre-Adrien Paris. Neuchâtel has several excellent museums, including the Laténium, an archaeology museum focusing on the pre-historical times in Neuchâtel and Hauterive regions, particularly the La Tène culture. There’s also the MEN, an ethnography museum. But the flagship Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Esplanade Léopold-Robert, and its star attractions, the astonishing Automates Jaquet-Droz (Jaquet-Droz Mechanical Figurines) is not to be missed.
The Musée d’Art is worth going out of your for both for its innovative art collection, and for its set of charming eighteenth-century mechanical figurines which demonstrate in understated style the quite exceptional skills of the Neuchâtel watchmakers of the era. Instead of displaying works by period, artist, or genre, the collection is grouped by theme, with the various rooms labelled Nature, Civilization, The Sacred, and so on.
In an inspired piece of creative design harking back to earlier centuries, thecurators have crammed each room with art from floor to ceiling, with medieval still lives, contemporary abstractions, Impressionisticindulgences and others, thereby inducing the visitor to make dynamic connections between utterly distinct works. Interestingly, in each room you can climb podia - each one hung all round with paintings - in order to get a better view of the works hanging high on the four walls.
Still characterized by remote, windswept settlements and deep, rugged valleys, Neuchatel is also the heartland of the celebrated Swiss watch making industry which centred on the once-famous towns of LaChaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, both of which rely heavily on theirhorological past to draw in visitors.
In a country where cheese making is a cottage industry and fondue the national food, Neuchatel has its own variety: fondue Neuchâteloise. The city is also home to a small but active University and the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnologies (CSEM), located close to the lake. The lakeside has benches and tables where students can be seen poring over their textbooks shaded by a tree and lulled by the noise as the water slaps the stones and pebbles. Sitting on one of the benches with huge white swans for company, I prayed in my heart, “Oh God! In my next birth let me be born in Neuchatel and study at the local University.” If that was not possible, I reasoned with the Almighty, at least in my present life I would like my school-going daughter to be here to attend college.
We had been Neuchatel for two hours and it was time to rush to take the 8.20 a.m. train to Geneva. As we listened intently to the announcement made at the station while we waited for the train, my colleague asked, “Are you aware that bahnof is derived from the Hindi word vahan?” He went further, "Bahnof means a depot where vehicles arrive and leave for their destinations, just as Marathi Agar...Busagar.” Whether the German word has any relation to the Hindi word, considering that German is a conservative language unlike English which is progressive, the observation was amusing enough. But there was nothing stopping my friend, “Do you know Lufthansa is made of two words lupt (to disappear) hansa (swan)…”
Fortunately the train arrived, right on time as usual, to end our brief visit to Neuchatel.
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