The Water Tower
The eight-century octagon — prison, treasury, beacon, now the nation's icon.
Simon Koopmann — CC BY-SA 2.5 · JoachimKohler-HB — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Andrew Bossi — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Bybbisch94 — CC BY 4.0
A cigarette or moored boat — never settled — lit the bridge at night, devouring 78 paintings and two-thirds of the timber before a city weeping on the banks. Rebuilding took eight months to matching craft, and the choice to hang the charred panels among the whole made the bridge a lesson in memory, not mere restoration — study the black gaps as you cross.
Everything but a chapel: water sentinel first, then prison and torture room, then city treasury and archive — the name comes from St Peter's chapel at the bridge's head, not the tower. Today the venerable artillery guild keeps it, with a summer souvenir stand at its foot.
Cross south reading the panels, take the right Reuss bank west to the second wooden Spreuer Bridge (its Dance of Death paintings older and stranger), return by the left bank and its cafés — the golden bridges loop, one hour summarising all old Lucerne.
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Europe's oldest covered wooden bridge and very nearly its most photographed structure: the Kapellbrücke has crossed the Reuss since 1333 in its graceful dog-leg, the octagonal Water Tower — Lucerne's and half Switzerland's emblem — planted at its middle a century longer. Under its roof runs a file of triangular seventeenth-century paintings telling the city's and its saints' history — some survived the famous 1993 fire that ate two-thirds of the bridge before the city rebuilt it in months as it was, the charred panels left deliberately among the renewed as witnesses. Flower boxes blaze red along its flanks spring to autumn, swans patrol its outflow, and Mount Pilatus closes the horizon behind — crossing it out and back by both banks is Lucerne's obligatory overture, free at every hour of light.
The eight-century octagon — prison, treasury, beacon, now the nation's icon.
Seventeenth-century triangles telling Lucerne head over head.
The blazing geranium boxes — the famous summer edition.
The bridge's single bend across the river — secret of every composition.
Kapellbrücke, 6002 Lucerne