LucerneTravel Guide

Europe's famous covered wooden footbridge angles across the Reuss beneath a sturdy octagonal tower, flower boxes frothing along its flanks.

The weekly market, the Wochenmarkt, runs on Tuesday and Saturday mornings, generally from about six until around noon, and it is reason enough on its own to set an alarm here.

The lake is the region's true main street, and the historic steamers are not a tourist novelty bolted onto it — they are scheduled public transport, listed in the timetable alongside the buses.

Downstream from the famous Kapellbrücke, the Spreuer Bridge crosses the Reuss with far fewer admirers and a far stranger cargo.

Switzerland Tourism lists it among the country's most-visited museums, and an afternoon there explains why: locomotives, aircraft, ships, cars and spacecraft across a campus of halls, plus a planetarium, a film theatre and a walk-through chocolate exhibit.

Lake Lucerne still supplies local kitchens.

Lucerne takes chocolate seriously.

The promenade along the lake's north shore, running east from the Seebrücke, is Belle Epoque hotel row and remains the address the city is known for.

Chateau Gutsch is Lucerne's fairytale outlier — a turreted nineteenth-century castle hotel on the wooded ridge above town, with a terrace view over roofs, lake and mountains that is the whole reason to come.

Two properties on the Buergenstock ridge, across the water and a few hundred metres above it, are destinations in their own right.