A village at the bottom of a canyon of waterfalls
Lauterbrunnen sits at about 802 meters above sea level in the Bernese Oberland, in a U-shaped valley carved by a glacier. The valley is rarely more than a kilometer across, and sheer rock walls rise up to about 1,000 meters on both sides. About 2,300 people lived in the village in 2020.
Water pours off those walls in 72 waterfalls, according to the Jungfrau Region tourism site. The best known is Staubbach Falls, which drops about 297 meters right next to the village and is described as the highest free-falling waterfall in Switzerland. Inside the mountain nearby, the Trümmelbach Falls are ten glacier-fed waterfalls that can carry up to 20,000 liters of water per second and are reached by a tunnel lift.
Above the valley, the car-free villages of Wengen and Mürren sit on the cliff tops with views of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, and a cable car from Mürren runs to the Schilthorn. The author J. R. R. Tolkien walked into the valley in 1911, and its landscape is often linked to his Rivendell.
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