Switzerland · Old Town
Bern
A self-guided walking tour of the Bern Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Bern is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 21.2 km
- Time
- about 6 hours
- Streets
- 94
- Steps
- 10 streets with steps
- Start point
- Bundeshaus – Parlamentsgebäude
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Bundeshaus – Parlamentsgebäude 1,500 points
Everybody photographs it from the square. Do the opposite: walk round behind, onto the Bundesterrasse, where the ground stops and the country begins. On a clear day the white wall of the Alps lines up along the horizon, and nobody up there says much.
Bärengraben 500 points
Over the river and up the other side, at the very end of everything. A wide terraced enclosure steps down the bank, and its residents explain this town's shield better than any book does. Give them time. They are not in a hurry either.
Münster 500 points
Walk behind it to the Plattform. Chestnut trees, gravel, benches, and then a railing with a very long nothing on the far side of it: the low quarter and the river lie straight underneath. A lift runs down from here. Walking up again is the better half.
Zytglogge 500 points
Come at it from the east and look up at the painted dial before anything else. Then wait with the small crowd that collects underneath every sixty minutes. They are all early for the same reason, and I am keeping it to myself.
Einsteinhaus 250 points
One door in a row of identical doors, under the same arcades as the shops. Nothing outside it asks for your attention, which is rather the joke. Count the numbers along until you arrive, then go up a flight.
Heiliggeistkirche 250 points
The outer end of the lanes, where the covered walk gives out and everything with wheels arrives at once. It stands on its own patch of stone with traffic passing either side, which suits a landmark better than it suits a church. Begin here, or finish here.
Käfigturm 250 points
The lane runs straight at it, splits, and joins up again beyond. Go under the arch rather than along the sides. Past this point the paving widens and the stalls take over. Narrow first, then the market. A sensible order.
Nydeggbrücke 250 points
Stop in the middle and turn around. The town stacks itself up behind you in layers, roofs above roofs above a long face of grey stone, and everything you have walked is in one frame. Then carry on. Dessert is on the far bank.
Rathaus 250 points
Most of this one's face is staircase. Two flights climb from the lane, meet on a landing, and only then release you at the door. I approve of an entrance you have to earn.
Eating
Actual food.
Bern is a farm canton with a parliament in it. The food comes down from the Emmental, up from the Seeland and out of the Gürbetal, and on the fourth Monday in November the growers park thirty tons of onions on the square where the country is governed. The house dish is a platter with everything on it at once. I approve of a town that solves lunch by refusing to choose.
Meat and fish
Berner Platte
One platter and everything is on it at once: salted and smoked pork, sausage, bacon, beans and potatoes, all lying on sauerkraut. The register can only follow it back to 1900, when a cook wrote it down as a garnish. Two founding legends say it is older, and neither one survives a check.
It is built for a table, not for a person. Ask whether they do a half platter.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Gnagi
Salted pork: knuckle, trotter, ear and tail, boiled soft and eaten off the bone. It arrives with thick pea soup, or it arrives on the Berner Platte. The word means a hard lump to gnaw at, which is the most honest name a dish has ever given itself.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Emmentaler Bauernbratwurst
A short smoked sausage from the valley east of here, sold in pairs. It looks like a grilling sausage and it is not one. It gets warmed through in hot water, and somebody in Bern will tell you so before your hand reaches the grill.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Vegetarian
Zibelechueche
Onions cooked slowly soft in butter, then baked into pastry with milk, cream, egg and Gruyère. It belongs to the fourth Monday in November, when growers bring thirty tons of onions onto the square where the country is governed. A tart with its own market day is my kind of tart.
Ask whether there is bacon in the onions. Some houses do it that way.
Sources: Bundesamt für Kultur, GuteKueche.ch
Berner Haselnusslebkuchen
Ground hazelnuts, sugar and egg white, baked so briefly that the outside cracks and the middle stays soft. No flour, no water, nothing else. It is usually cut in the shape of a bear, because Bern cannot help itself.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Meringues mit Doppelrahm
Egg white and sugar, dried rather than baked, under a heavy spoon of thick cream. Everyone tells you the name comes from Meiringen up the valley. The register went to look, found that the village had gone up in flames twice and taken its papers with it, and left the question open. I like a pudding with an alibi problem.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Vegan
Two, and the reason is history rather than neglect. In Catholic towns the plant kitchen is the fasting kitchen, built out of the church calendar. The Swiss Reformation opened by breaking the fasting rule on purpose, at a sausage supper in 1522, and Bern went the same way six years later. So the plant food here never came from the church. It came off the fields, and the fields around Bern grew cabbage and beans.
Sauerkraut und Sauerrüben aus dem Gürbetal
Cabbage and turnips salted and left to go sour, which is how this canton carried vegetables through winter. The valley south of the city grew so much of it that people still call it the cabbage country. It is also the bed the Berner Platte lies on, so you may order the bed and leave everything above it.
Ask whether the kraut was cooked with bacon or lard. In this canton it usually was.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Ackerbohne
The broad bean, Europe's main pulse until the potato pushed it aside, and back now on menus that want protein with no animal in it. Bern owes it a favour: a mocking bean song written here in the 1520s helped tip the city into the Reformation. A bean with a political record is worth chewing.
Sources: Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz
Late breakfast
Lesbar come for the one thing: the courtyard under wisteria
Münstergasse 61-63
A café on the ground floor of the university library, in the oldest part of a house that was a granary and then a market hall for dairy. Deep sofas in the window bays, pointed arches over a long narrow room, and a courtyard under wisteria that the lane outside knows nothing about. Coffee, Birchermüesli, cake and one short lunch card, and on market Saturdays it opens at seven.
- Mon08:00–20:00
- Tue07:30–20:00
- Wed07:30–20:00
- Thu07:30–20:00
- Fri07:30–20:00
- Sat07:00–18:00
- Sun10:00–17:00
The courtyard is round the back, through the library building. Ask inside if you cannot find it.
Sources: Hauptstadt (Bern), Bärner Mamis (Alessandra Dumartheray), Universität Bern
Lehrerzimmer where locals go
Waisenhausplatz 30
On Sunday there is no menu. You get a sheet of paper and a pencil, tick what you want, and it comes out on small plates the whole table reaches across. Scrambled eggs in five versions, arepas from Colombia, hummus, cheese, plaited bread. The room really was the teachers' lounge once, and it is a café and an art bookshop at the same time now.
- Mon17:00–22:00
- Tue14:00–23:00
- Wed14:00–00:30
- Thu14:00–00:30
- Fri14:00–02:00
- Sat11:00–02:00
- Sun10:00–21:00
The brunch is Sunday only, from ten, and there are few tables, so write to them first. Anything with yoghurt in it comes in a plant version if you ask.
Sources: Bärner Meitschi (Nina), PROGR Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, Bern Welcome
Afternoon coffee
Friend or Foe Specialty Coffee Market come for the one thing: the ever changing coffee list
Marktgasse 19
Down a staircase under Marktgasse, in a cellar you would walk over a hundred times without noticing. It buys five kilos from one roaster at a time and when that is gone it is gone, so the list is never the same twice. Nobody offers you sugar, which is the point.
- Mon08:30–17:00
- Tue08:30–17:00
- Wed08:30–17:00
- Thu08:30–17:00
- Fri08:30–17:00
- Sat09:00–17:00
- Sunclosed
Closed on Sunday, and the doors shut at 17:00 every day.
Sources: The Way To Coffee (Theresa Schlage), Bärner Meitschi, GaultMillau Schweiz
Bruin Café & Co where locals go
Gerechtigkeitsgasse 4
A small room at the bottom of Gerechtigkeitsgasse, right where the Old Town runs out onto the bridge. The card is deliberately short: one filter, one espresso, matcha, tea, cake and filled pretzels. There is a bench at the window for the morning sun, and by six in the evening it belongs to people who finished work nearby.
- Monclosed
- Tue08:00–19:00
- Wed08:00–19:00
- Thu08:00–19:00
- Fri08:00–19:00
- Sat10:00–17:00
- Sun10:00–17:00
Closed on Monday, and it shuts at 17:00 at the weekend.
Sources: GaultMillau Schweiz, Bärner Meitschi
Dinner
Harmonie the old one
Hotelgasse 3
A panelled Beiz in a side lane behind the clock tower, where somebody has been feeding people since 1836 and one family held it from 1915 until 2023. Fondue, Rösti, calf's liver, and a different dish written up for each day of the week. It shuts on Sunday, which in a capital city tells you who it cooks for.
- Mon11:00–23:00
- Tue11:00–23:00
- Wed11:00–23:00
- Thu11:00–23:00
- Fri11:00–23:00
- Sat10:00–23:00
- Sunclosed
The kitchen stops at 22:00. Turn up before it does.
Sources: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Plattform J / Jungfrau Zeitung, Schweiz Tourismus (MySwitzerland)
Fischerstübli come for the one thing: the tartare
Gerberngasse 41
Down in the Matte, the old river quarter under the cliff, in a house that has been an inn for more than four hundred years. The kitchen handed itself over to tartare: a dozen with beef, three with fish, two with neither. Everything is made in the house, and you have to take the stairs down from the Old Town to get there, which I count as a feature.
- Monclosed
- Tue11:30–14:30, 17:30–23:00
- Wed11:30–14:30, 17:30–23:00
- Thu11:30–14:30, 17:30–23:00
- Fri11:30–14:30, 17:30–23:30
- Sat11:30–23:30
- Sunclosed
Closed Sunday and Monday, and it shuts for a fortnight each autumn. Check the dates before you walk down.
Sources: GaultMillau Schweiz, Die Berner Matte (Leist der Untern Stadt)
Café Postgasse where locals go
Postgasse 48
Below the town hall in the lower Old Town, a parlour that has fed people for over 150 years and changed hands in 2022 after one landlady had held it for 34. Swiss classics off the market, French bistro standards, and a Sri Lankan curry that changes whenever the head cook decides it should. There is a regulars' table and it is occupied.
- Monclosed
- Tue18:00–23:30
- Wed18:00–23:30
- Thu18:00–23:30
- Fri18:00–23:30
- Sat18:00–23:30
- Sunclosed
Evenings only, Tuesday to Saturday. The telephone is answered from 16:00.
Sources: GaultMillau Schweiz, Hauptstadt (Bern)
Checked 5 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Bern.
The name is older than any proof of it. In writing it turns up as Berna in 1191 and as burgum de Berno by 1218, and there the paper stops. The town's own story is that a duke rode out to look the site over, went hunting, met a bear and named the place after it. The reference work of record points somewhere else, and does it carefully: a small inscribed metal plate dug out of the woods upstream reads Brenodor, and that may be the older name wearing down. The bear won anyway. A good story beats a piece of metal.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch; www.bern.ch
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at the bend in the river. The Old Town sits on a spur of ground inside a loop of the Aare, water on three sides and one dry way in. The Zähringer laid it out between the castle at the point and the tower that shuts the other end: about 750 metres long, 175 metres wide on average, one broad market lane down the middle with a smaller lane either side of it. Those market lanes measure 17 to 18 metres across and once ran to 27. That is a generous portion of street.
Sources: bauinventar.bern.ch p. 1; www.bern.ch
Why then
When the first stone went down.
1191, and the question mark belongs to the lexicon, not to me. The oldest source for the founding is the town's own chronicle. The founding town itself went up between 1191 and 1210, and the first extension followed between 1220 and 1230. Before any of that, the whole river loop belonged to a royal estate out at Bümpliz. Somebody looked at a working farm and decided the bend was worth more.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch; bauinventar.bern.ch p. 1
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1191–1218
The Zähringer. Duke Berchtold V laid the town out on imperial ground and gave it a town law modelled on Freiburg im Breisgau. When the town passed to the Empire, King Friedrich II wrote it a fresh charter in 1218. The first one is lost. Twenty-seven years of ownership and not a sheet of paper left to show for it.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch
- 1218–1353
Itself, more or less. The charter of 1218 is the Golden Handfeste, and by 1223 Bern is named as an imperial city. A council is on record in 1224 and two councils by 1249; after 1293 the commune elected sixteen men whose whole job was to elect the Council of Two Hundred. That is a lot of committee for one loop of river.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch
- 1353–1798
Its own council, and steadily everybody else's. In 1353 Bern made its first open-ended alliance with Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, which later historians read as joining the Confederation. Over the centuries that followed, the largest city-state north of the Alps was run out of one house on the main lane. I have administered nothing in all that time, and I was here first.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch
- 1798–
Switzerland, eventually. On 5 March 1798 French troops occupied the city and the old Bern was finished. Fifty years later the new country needed a federal city and chose this one; the townspeople accepted at the end of 1848 by 419 votes to 313, which the lexicon files as little enthusiasm. Executive and legislature have sat here ever since.
Sources: hls-dhs-dss.ch; hls-dhs-dss.ch
The emblem
What the shield means.
A bear, mid-stride. On the shield it walks up a gold band laid across red, with red claws and a red tongue; the official wording of 1944 is a gold bend on red charged with a striding black bear. The icon keeps the animal and leaves the rest off, because at this size a diagonal band is only a stripe. It has been walking that band since the town seal of 1224 and has still not arrived anywhere.
Sources: de.wikipedia.org
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Bern has no showpiece building, and that is structural. The layout leaves no room for large open spaces: the two that exist, in front of the Rathaus and the Münster, were opened up later by pulling houses down, and every public building ended up at the rim of the town instead. What UNESCO listed in 1983 was the plan itself, a medieval one still in working order, and not any single thing standing on it. That suits me. I would rather have a long lane than a tall building.
Sources: bauinventar.bern.ch p. 1; www.kultur.bkd.be.ch
Six kilometres of this level are roofed. The ground floors of the sandstone houses open into round-arched arcades on both sides of the lane, the eaves reach far out overhead, and the fountains stand at intervals between them, putting colour against all that grey stone. The lane itself curves gently and falls away east the whole time. Bern is the only place I have eaten indoors.
There is a second town underneath this one. The Matte lies on the riverbank about forty metres lower than the founding town, off every through route, and a horse and cart could only get in through the Mattenenge. Corn mills and saw mills, a stamping works, and the landing where goods came off the river: all of it down there, out of sight of the lanes above. Stairs are how you get between the two. A town that serves a course one floor down is doing something right.
Sources: www.bern.ch; www.bern.ch
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Gasse
- The everyday word for a street. Kramgasse, Gerechtigkeitsgasse, Postgasse, Junkerngasse, Brunngasse: the first half tells you what used to go on there.
- Gässchen
- The same word, shrunk, and Bern has piles of them: Metzgergässchen, Schlüsselgässchen, Storchengässchen, Finstergässchen, Ryffligässchen. In Bernese it comes out -gässli, which is how the onion lane got to be the Zibelegässli.
- Passage
- A cut straight through a block of houses, counted as a street of its own. Marktgass-Passage, Spitalgass-Passage, Zeughaus-Passage, Von-Werdt-Passage, Waaghaus-Passage. Bern's answer to a wall is a hole in it.
- Stalden
- A steep pull. The Nydeggstalden drops off the end of the old lanes and the Grosser Muristalden climbs away on the other side; Mani-Matter-Stutz is the same idea under a different word. Uphill dots taste no better, in case you were hoping.
- Treppe
- Steps, filed as a street. Mattentreppe, Nydeggtreppe, Fricktreppe, Burgtreppe. All four are counted, all four are dotted, and all four are steeper than the map lets on.
- Graben
- A ditch, named for the one that used to run outside a town wall. Hirschengraben and Münzgraben are both filled in and paved over now. The town kept eating outwards and swallowed its own edges. I understand the impulse.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Bern in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 94streets
- 1,124dots
- 17.1km of street
- 21.2km on foot
- 6hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.