Thun walking tour & city guide

The castle and the old town

Thun Castle was built around 1200 by the Dukes of Zähringen. Its massive keep, with a turret at each corner, holds a museum and a great knights' hall, and its top floor looks out over the roofs of the town, the lake and the mountains. A covered wooden stairway climbs to it from the old town, past the town church.

Below, the Obere Hauptgasse is one of the most unusual streets in Switzerland: the pavements run along the flat roofs of the ground-floor shops, so pedestrians walk one storey up, with a second row of shops at street level beneath them. The street opens onto the Rathausplatz, a square of arcaded houses and the town hall.

The Aare and the lakeshore

The Aare splits into two arms as it runs through Thun, crossed by old sluice gates and covered wooden bridges hung with flower boxes. In the warm months surfers ride a standing wave in the river right in the town, and in summer swimmers float down the cool, clear current.

Along the lakeshore lies Schadau Park, with a 19th-century castle and the Wocher Panorama, a circular painting of Thun from the early 1800s and one of the oldest surviving panoramas in the world. Boats, including a historic paddle steamer, sail from Thun to the lakeside castles of Oberhofen and Spiez and on towards Interlaken.

A walking route

From the railway station, cross the Aare to the Mühleplatz by the sluices, then walk along the raised pavements of the Obere Hauptgasse to the Rathausplatz. Climb the covered stairs to the castle and the town church for the view, then come back down to the river and follow it upstream to where it leaves the lake, finishing with a stroll through Schadau Park.

Visiting tips

Thun is about twenty minutes from Bern by train and half an hour from Interlaken, which makes it an easy stop on the way into the mountains. The old town has weekly markets, and the lakeside paths are busiest on summer evenings. From the village of Mülenen, south of the lake, a funicular climbs the Niesen, the pyramid-shaped mountain seen across the water.