The Untere Gasse square
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painted façades and shutters.
Rectilinium — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rectilinium — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rectilinium — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rectilinium — CC BY-SA 4.0
Interlaken is expensive, but its best is free: the **Höhematte** — the huge green meadow in the middle of town (protected by law from building) with a direct view of the Jungfrau, where paragliders land all day; the Aare riverside walk; the old town of **Unterseen**; and the Lake Brienz quay at Interlaken Ost. These are enjoyable hours without a single franc, between the expensive mountain trips.
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Unterseen is a small town adjoining Interlaken, separated from it only by the river Aare — and most of Interlaken's visitors never cross the bridge to it, missing **the loveliest historic corner in the region**. Founded in 1279, its old square (Untere Gasse) is ringed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wooden and stone houses with painted façades and shutters, a church with an old tower, and mills on the river. The irony is that Interlaken itself is not a historic town in the strict sense — it grew in the nineteenth century as a tourist resort around its old monastery, so its streets are hotels, watch shops and souvenirs. Unterseen, by contrast, is a real Swiss town with ordinary daily life, **ten minutes on foot** from the tourist centre. It holds the region's tourism museum (Touristik-Museum), telling how the English and Germans invented Alpine tourism here in the nineteenth century. Free to wander — the best free hour in Interlaken.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painted façades and shutters.
Old mills and green water between the two towns.
How Europeans invented Alpine tourism here.
Untere Gasse, 3800 Unterseen