Bern

Bern is the rare European capital that travels smaller than its status: the entire old town fits on a sandstone tongue of land inside a loop of the River Aare, and the federal parliament sits a two-minute walk from a medieval clock tower and the city’s resident bears. The mistake first-timers make is over-committing — Bern gets booked as a multi-night base when its whole UNESCO core is a half-day’s walk, or it gets dismissed and skipped entirely when it sits dead centre on the Zurich-Geneva line and costs nothing in detour. The right read is somewhere between: a deliberate half-day stop, or a calm one or two nights that you’ll remember for the arcades and the river rather than a checklist of sights.

The thing to get right is the rhythm. Arrive a few minutes before the hour so the Zytglogge clock figures perform, walk the 6km of covered arcades downhill — they keep you dry, which is why Bern survives a wet day better than most Swiss cities — and finish at the bear park and the Aare bridge for the view back up over the rooftops. Below, the structured planning picks up from there: where to stay if you do overnight, the train links in and out, and a realistic budget in pounds for a city that carries Switzerland’s prices without its mountain-excursion bills.