Bern: Arcades, the Clock and the Bears
A UNESCO old town inside a river loop — the parliament of a country with no single leader, a clock that has run since 1530, the flat where Einstein wrote E=mc squared, and the bears the city is named after.
This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.
At ~45 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Bern makes a full-day itinerary.
Nearby walks within 150 km
- Lucerne: Bridges, Wall and the Dying Lion — 6 stops, ~70 min
- Basel: Gates, the Rhine and the First Museum — 6 stops, ~65 min
- Heart of Zurich: Altstadt Highlights Walking Tour — 8 stops, ~65 min
- Geneva: Calvin's City and the Lake — 7 stops, ~75 min
All Switzerland walking tours · All 149 routes
Bern, Switzerland · ~45 min · 1.8 km · 6 stops
Stops on this walk
1. Federal Palace
The parliament of a country that refuses to have a single leader.
Finished in 1902, the Bundeshaus holds both chambers of the Swiss parliament and the seven-member Federal Council that serves as head of state — collectively. Switzerland has no president in the usual sense: the presidency rotates yearly among the seven and carries no extra power. The square in front is not fenced. Demonstrations happen against the facade, and in summer 26 fountains, one for each canton, play directly on the paving where people walk. A seat of government that lets the public stand on its doorstep is itself a statement about where authority is held to come from.
Look at the scale. For a national parliament it is small, and deliberately so — power in Switzerland is meant to sit in the cantons and the communes.
2. Kaefigturm
A city gate that became a prison, and a marker of how fast Bern grew.
Bern was founded in 1191 on a bend of the Aare and then pushed west three times. Each time the old western gate stayed where it was and a new one went up further out. This tower marks the second line; its present form was built between 1641 and 1644. Its name means cage tower. Once the wall moved past it, it stopped being a gate and became the city jail. Walk east from here along Marktgasse and you are retracing the direction Bern expanded — every tower you pass was once the edge of town.
Bern's old town is a UNESCO site not for one monument but for this — six kilometres of arcades and a street plan that still shows every stage of a medieval city's growth.
3. Zytglogge
Bern's first western gate, and an astronomical clock running since 1530.
This was the city gate around 1218-1220, when Bern was only a few streets long. As the town pushed west the tower lost that job, served as a women's prison, burned in 1405 and was rebuilt as a clock tower. The astronomical clock on the east face was built by Kaspar Brunner between 1527 and 1530 and still runs on its original movement. It shows the hour, the weekday, the month, the zodiac and the phase of the moon. A few minutes before each hour a rooster crows, bears parade and a gilded figure strikes the bell. The crowd gathers on the east side, which is the side worth standing on.
Einstein caught his tram home under this clock. The thought experiment that opened special relativity asks how a clock tower would look from a tram moving away at the speed of light — and this is the clock tower.
4. Einstein House
The second-floor flat where a patent clerk rewrote physics in a single year.
Albert Einstein moved into Kramgasse 49 in 1903, newly married and working as a technical expert third class at the Swiss patent office a few streets away. He was twenty-four and had failed to get an academic post. In 1905, in this flat and in the evenings after work, he wrote four papers: on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on special relativity, and the short one containing E=mc squared. Any one of them would have made a career. Physicists call it the annus mirabilis. The rooms are furnished as they were and open as a small museum.
Bern keeps this as a flat, not a shrine — a staircase, a kitchen, a desk by the window. The most consequential year in modern physics happened in rented rooms above a shop.
5. Bern Minster
Switzerland's tallest church tower, finished 472 years after the first stone.
Work started in 1421. The Reformation reached Bern in 1528 and stopped it. The tower stood unfinished for three and a half centuries and was completed only in 1893, at 100.6 metres — still the tallest church tower in Switzerland. You can climb it. The main portal survived that Reformation. Its Last Judgment carries 234 figures and is the most complete group of its kind left in Europe from before the iconoclasm, because Bern's reformers stripped the interior and left the doorway alone. Inside, the bare walls and the empty niches are the record of what was taken out.
Look at the doorway, then at the interior. The same city made both decisions within a few years — keep the warning at the door, empty the room behind it.
6. Bear Park
The city's namesake animals, kept here in one form or another since 1513.
Bern's name and its coat of arms are a bear, and the city has kept live bears since at least 1513, when soldiers are recorded bringing one back from a campaign in Italy. For most of that time the animals lived in a stone pit, and for most of that time nobody thought to ask whether that was acceptable. In 2009 the pit was replaced by a park running down the riverbank, with slopes, trees and access to the Aare. The old pit is still there beside it, empty and open to walk into — the city chose to keep the thing it decided to stop doing.
Across the bridge behind you the old town sits inside the river's loop. From here you can see why anyone would found a city on that bend — water on three sides and one gate to defend.