A 360° panorama
Three lakes below and the Alpine chain on the horizon.
Andrew Bossi — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Gianluca Miscione — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Roy Egloff — CC BY-SA 4.0 · FkMohr — CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Sunrise from Rigi Kulm has been famous since the nineteenth century, but it requires **staying overnight at the summit hotel**, because for most of the year the first train up arrives after dawn — and the rooms are expensive and plain. If the morning is misty, the whole effort is wasted. Our advice for the ordinary visitor: go up in daylight on a clear day and walk an hour between stations. You get ninety per cent of the pleasure for a tenth of the cost and effort. Leave the sunrise to those staying two nights in the area.
Go up from **Vitznau**: about an hour by boat from Lucerne across the water, then the historic 1871 cogwheel railway, which is the most beautiful stretch. Come down to **Arth-Goldau**, where an ordinary train returns you to Lucerne in roughly half an hour. That way you never repeat a view, and the day ends faster than returning by boat. If time is short, get off at **Rigi Kaltbad**, take the cable car to Weggis and the boat from there.
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Rigi stands alone between three lakes — Lucerne, Zug and Lauerz — which is why it is called **the Queen of the Mountains**: no other peak blocks it, so the view from the summit at **Rigi Kulm (1,797 m)** is a full circle over the water below and the Alpine chain beyond. It is also unusually gentle for a Swiss mountain: meadows, graded footpaths and cows rather than vertical rock. Rigi is the cradle of mountain tourism in Europe. **The Vitznau–Rigi cogwheel railway, opened on 21 May 1871, was the first mountain railway in Europe**, followed by the Arth-Goldau line in 1875. Before and after, **J. M. W. Turner** painted the mountain in his famous studies of light and mist, and **Mark Twain** climbed it in the late 1870s to see the sunrise, slept through it, woke for the sunset and mistook it for dawn — an episode he turned into an entire comic chapter. Getting up: the cogwheel railway from **Vitznau** on the lakeshore (reached by boat from Lucerne, which is the loveliest way), or from **Arth-Goldau** by train on the far side, or the cable car from **Weggis** to Rigi Kaltbad. Best of all is to go up one way and down the other. At Kaltbad there is a mineral bath and spa designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened in 2012, with windows looking out over the lake.
Three lakes below and the Alpine chain on the horizon.
The 1871 route from Vitznau still runs on the same track.
A Mario Botta mineral bath looking out over the lake.
Rigi Kulm, above Vitznau and Arth-Goldau