Schwyz

Schwyz is a small town at the foot of the Mythen peaks near Lake Lucerne, and the country is named after it. So is the flag: the white cross on red was the canton’s banner before it was anyone else’s.

This is the heart of the founding myth, and unusually for founding myths a good deal of it is documented.

The flag is unusual in another way, too: Switzerland is one of only two countries with a square national flag, the other being the Vatican.

The Federal Charter

The Bundesbriefmuseum was built in the 1930s specifically to hold one document: the Federal Charter of 1291, in which the men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden swore mutual aid against anyone who threatened them.

Whether it is the founding document of Switzerland is a question historians argue about — it is one of several such pacts, and the 1291 date was chosen for the anniversary in 1891 rather than the other way round. But it exists, it is here, and it is on parchment in a case in a room built as a shrine to it, with murals of the oath around the walls.

Upstairs, a long hall is hung with flags and banners taken in battle over the centuries. The charter itself still carries the wax seals of Uri and Unterwalden; Schwyz’s own seal was lost long ago.

The museum is small and it takes forty minutes.

History

Schwyz is first recorded in 972, and by 1144 the valley was already closely tied to its neighbours Uri and Unterwalden. The three found themselves at the centre of resistance when the Habsburgs, having taken the dominant position in eastern Switzerland by 1264, tried to fold local communities into their own domains by stripping out old privileges. The forest valleys sat by the road to the Gotthard pass, and their communities gained ground from the long contest between the Hohenstaufen emperors and the papacy: Uri was granted the status of an imperial territory in 1231, Schwyz in 1240, freeing both from the lesser feudal lords around them.

The empire went into a long crisis after Emperor Frederick II died in 1250 — the Great Interregnum, in effect a civil war, ran until 1273 — and the Habsburgs used the opening to try to take Schwyz by force between 1245 and 1252. Uri and Unterwalden came to its defence as a temporary alliance. In August 1291 the same three cantons sealed a permanent mutual-defence pact, the first documented act of cooperation between the forest cantons, and the point from which the country’s official history is usually dated. Unterwalden itself no longer appears on the map: it later split into the half-cantons of Obwalden and Nidwalden.

The alliance had its first real test at Morgarten in 1315, a victory over the Habsburgs. From then on the confederates came to be known as Schwyzers, after the canton — a name that stuck as the confederation grew around them.

Forum der Schweizer Geschichte

A separate branch of the Swiss National Museum sits in the town centre, behind the bus stop. Its three floors move from how people in town and country used natural resources through Swiss history, to social structure and the relationship between church and state, and finally to why the country’s path turned out the way it did, with a good deal of video and interactive material along the way.

The town

Schwyz grew rich on the mercenary trade — this canton supplied soldiers to half of Europe for three centuries, and the officers came home with money.

The result is a town of substantial baroque houses in a place with no other obvious reason for wealth. The Ital Reding Hofstatt is the best of them: a 1609 patrician house with painted rooms and a garden, next to Haus Bethlehem, a timber house built in 1287 and one of the oldest in Switzerland.

A few minutes’ walk from the museums, the Hauptplatz has the town’s two principal buildings, both rebuilt after a fire in 1642: the parish church of St Martin, and the town hall. The town hall’s painted facade dates from 1891, added for the 600th anniversary of the oath on the Rütli.

Victorinox and the Swiss army knife

The town’s other export is a short walk south, at Ibach. In 1884 Karl Elsener, a young cutler, set up an association of Swiss knifemakers to supply the army with a folding knife; the business nearly went under in 1893 when German manufacturers undercut him on price. He kept refining the design, patented a lighter version in 1897, and it spread by reputation among Swiss officers before the army formally adopted it.

He had named his factory Victoria, after his mother; when he began using stainless steel in 1921 — known internationally as inox — he combined the two into Victorinox. The knife went on to official use by the Swiss army and, after the Second World War, by the American one too. The factory at Ibach still makes them by the tens of thousands a day.

The Rütli

Across the lake at Seelisberg lies the Rütli, the meadow where the oath is said to have been sworn. It is owned by the Confederation, it is reachable only by boat or on foot, and there is nothing on it — a field, a flagpole and a view.

That emptiness is the point. It is the national site and it has been deliberately left as a piece of grass.

The Way of Switzerland

The Weg der Schweiz runs 35 km round the Urnersee, the southern arm of Lake Lucerne, from the Rütli to Brunnen. It was laid out for the 700th anniversary in 1991, and each canton was allotted a stretch proportional to its population — five millimetres per inhabitant — in order of joining the Confederation.

It is walked in stages with the boat doing the returns, and it is the most Swiss thing on this website.

Nearby

• Einsiedeln — half an hour, an enormous baroque abbey with a black madonna, and one of the largest pilgrimage sites north of the Alps
• Rigi — the railway from Arth-Goldau, twenty minutes away
• Brunnen and the lake — the boats to Lucerne and Flüelen
• Stoos — a car-free village reached by the steepest funicular in the world, at 110% gradient, opened in 2017
• Seewen — a cheese dairy near the railway station where you can watch the cheese being made and taste it; see cheese dairies
• Hölloch — a karst cave system in the Muotatal with around 190 km of surveyed passages, one of the longest in Europe; guided tours only
• Sattel-Hochstuckli — a ski area above Rothenturm, reached by cable cars whose cabins revolve as they climb

A number of routes into the central Alps also start from the town itself; see hiking.

Cherry orchards and kirsch

The old road towards Lucerne, through Zug and on to Brunnen, runs through hill country planted with cherry orchards. Several distilleries along the way turn the fruit into kirsch, the clear cherry spirit that also goes into the well-known Zug cherry torte; some of them can be visited to see it made.

Getting there

• By train — Zurich about 50 minutes to Schwyz, with a change at Arth-Goldau. Lucerne about 45 minutes.
• By boat — from Lucerne to Brunnen, then a short bus.
• There is also a route from Zurich via Zug, taking about the same time as the Arth-Goldau one.
• Direct trains reach Schwyz from Basel, and from further down the Gotthard line at Erstfeld and Flüelen.

Schwyz itself runs more on buses than on trains: the railway station is in the suburb of Seewen, about 2 km from the centre, and a bus covers the rest of the way. The town’s own hub is the Schwyz-Post stop, where buses from Brunnen come in.

If you’re staying in the area for several days, a regional pass covering public transport and the mountain lifts around Lake Lucerne can work out cheaper than single tickets — see tickets and passes and saving money.

When to go

Any time; this is a town and a museum. 1 August, the national day, is the obvious date if you want the founding-myth version — there is a ceremony on the Rütli, and bonfires on the mountains all round the lake.