It’s a new year – although we’re nearly three weeks in by now – and as everyone will probably have eaten their body weight in cheese in the last month, let’s talk about a bit of Switzerland I apparently haven’t told you about yet. Today I’m going to Gruyères, the small fortified town where Gruyère cheese comes from. S on the end of the town, no s on the cheese.
I was living in Switzerland at the time, a language student who was studying French at a language school in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking north-west corner of the country, with grammar class at 8am on Mondays. That is, I was attending lessons and putting very little effort in, preferring to spend my time getting blocked from the uni wifi, exploring my adopted homeland and making scrapbooks of my adventures. The day in Gruyères was with my “triplets”, the two other Anglophones at the school. Jemma came from my home uni and was in my year, although we’d managed to not cross paths in our first two years (or in our final, come to that) and Angela/Peedee had come from Utah – we generally called her Peedee but her name is Angela and I suspect I use either with merry abandon in this blog, which may cause confusion if you decide to sit and read the entire series.
The SBB/CFF/FFS (Swiss national rail) website is currently telling me that I can get from Neuchâtel to Gruyères by train, albeit with two changes, usually at Fribourg and Bulle although I could also do Morges and Palézieux today thanks to the “current service situation”. When I went in 2006, I’m reasonably sure that we took the train to Fribourg and then had to get a bus to Gruyères. It was a long time ago, I don’t remember the details. Maybe the station is new in the last 17 years or maybe there was just a “service situation” on that particular day. Oh! No! Apparently we got a train to Fribourg, bus to Bulle and then another bus to Gruyères and it was a half-hour wait each time for the bus. We nearly missed the bus to Gruyères because Peedee was buying a bottle of soap. The reason for buying the soap right there and then is lost in the sands of time but evidently it did happen because I took a photo of it in Gruyères.
This is not how I’d do it these days. We didn’t leave Neuchâtel until half past two in the afternoon, or so my diary says. It’s about an hour to Fribourg by train, so 3.30. Get the bus to Bulle at 4, arrive 4.50, get the bus to Gruyères 5.20, arrive in Gruyères about… I don’t know, quarter to six. No, that can’t be right. The photos show bright mid-afternoon sunshine. We stayed an hour and a half, so 7.15 and we’re sitting at the bus stop under a blazing blue sky? No. The diary is clearly wrong here but I didn’t see fit to stick the ticket in my scrapbook on that particular trip so I can’t check the timestamp on it. Because I’m me, I guarantee it’s in a paper bag in a drawer or a cupboard somewhere but I’m not going to hunt it down after nearly seventeen years just so I can be accurate here. I can’t even figure it out it from my camera – it claims all the photos were taken 05/01/2001 between 02:19 and 05:50
If you’ve got a five hour round trip, leave before mid-afternoon, ok?
On the subject of my diary, would you like to read my entire account of the town?
Gruyeres was beautiful. A little town set on top of a hill, surrounded by mountains. This was the main road. And the only road. That’s about all there is to Gruyeres. To the left there is a castle and to the right there is a church and beside the church is a sort of walkway, with incredible views. We sat there, ate our picnic and took lots of photos. But then we had to go back. It was a two and a half hour journey each way and we stayed less than an hour and a half. We sat in the car park and waited for the last bus and I took photos.
Oh, the insight! Oh, the enthusiasm for the place! Let’s try to do better here in 2023!
Gruyères is a small fortified town in the Swiss countryside, set on a hill. It’s now a small quaint place where tourists go to see “real cheese-making Switzerland” but it’s a medieval town dominated by a castle in a defendable position. It partook in the 1476 Battle of Morat against Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy and won. It sheltered fleeing nuns during the Thirty Years’ War. It might not have been actively aggressive but it was clearly a working building. I admit, more castles than I realised are more decorative than defensive, built as country homes or hunting lodges for the very rich a few centuries ago, but I think this is the real thing. These days the castle is a museum. It’s had its time as a country home for the rich; it turns out restoring and keeping a castle is a real money drain. That’s why so many castles over here are now in the hands of either the National Trust or English Heritage. Their owners can’t afford them.
One place I should have visited while I was there was the Giger Museum. Yes, in a small fortified market town on a hill in the middle of the Swiss countryside is a museum dedicated to the work of Hans Ruedi Giger, a Swiss artist (although not from this region!) who started in small ink drawings, progressed to oil paintings and surreal canvases and is best remembered for his work in film, most notable designing the alien from Alien. He bought Saint-Germain Castle in Gruyères and now it’s home to his nightmarish surreal art. I had only the vaguest idea who he was when I visited back then. To be honest, I have only the vaguest idea now – Alien is not something I have ever watched or ever will watch – but I think I’d recognise that it’s something significant to see in Gruyères and would make the effort to go inside.
Tell you what I did do – I bought an actual genuine Swiss Army Knife in a small tourist shop. I know, they’re all “actual” and “genuine” but I had a realisation that it was a very good and very useful souvenir to buy in Switzerland while I was living there. I have two. Well, I had three. I bought a tiny keyring-sized one which I lost over Christmas, probably over Christmas 2005, so that wouldn’t be the one I bought here. I bought a tiny keyring-sized one to replace that one and it’s still in my knife pot on the shelf behind me right now, attached to a long chain to make it harder to lose. And I have a full size one, although it occurs to me that one might have been the free gift when I accidentally signed up to an open-ended subscription to The Great Outdoors Magazine some ten years ago. But I remember buying a knife in Gruyères and another in a department store in Lausanne. My “big” one is a relatively small one, actually. I think it’s a Climber – it’s the only one I can see that comes in traditional red that does have a small blade but doesn’t have a saw or a nail file. The little one is a Classic SD which means that the end of the nail file is square so you can use it as a screwdriver. And I have a transparent green Classic Signature I inherited from my grandad, who was into his tools – it’s almost exactly the same as my tiny one but it has a slide-out pen hidden inside it. Anyway, if you’re in Switzerland and your baggage arrangements allow it, I do recommend getting yourself a Swiss Army Knife.
In my diary, I mentioned the church. It was originally a Bulle parish church – or whatever church was in Gruyères at the time was a Bulle parish church. Gruyères had its own parish and its own parish church by 1254and like almost all medieval churches, it’s been damaged time and time again by fire. What’s standing today is largely a Victorian-era rebuilding, although I gather the choir and tower were largely undamaged. Everything I know about church architecture is pretty specifically either English or early-ish medieval Gothic, so I can’t tell anything from the photos I took in 2006 but I can see why it wouldn’t have caught my attention then – or, to be honest- today.
But the place does have a view. You can walk around the old medieval town walls, where you’re sheltered by a roof and from falling into the town by a wooden railing. Evidently we had (a late) lunch up on those walls – I have a nice picture of my Triplets sitting in one of the openings and I have plenty of pictures of the green hills beyond.
I think nowadays I’d at least look for cheese. Is there a traditional-style shop with cold stone floors that sells Gruyère? Is there somewhere I can watch it being made? Is there any way to connect the tourists to this town’s most famous export other than popping into the local supermarket? Google Maps says yes, there is La Maison de Gruyère, which is tagged “Prominent Gruyère cheese factory offering tours with audio guides, a museum, restaurant & gift shop.” Well, if I went back today I’d absolutely do a tour of that! I’d do a tour of the castle too, probably. I like castles.
This is why I haven’t blogged about this, presumably. We went late in the day, spent an hour and a half not doing much and left still not having much idea about what’s actually there. When I started this post, I would have agreed that you can pretty much cover Gruyères in a couple of hours but no – I could fill an entire day. Cheese factory, castle, Giger museum, exploring the town walls and the cobbled street, lunch with a view – oh, you could easily make a good day out of this small town. I recommend you do, in fact. Zurich, Geneva and Basel are all interesting big cities, Bern is an interesting small city, ski resorts are all very well – but if you want real Switzerland, real quaint medieval rural cheese-making Switzerland, I think you’d be hard-pressed to beat Gruyères and as an idiot student, I really didn’t do it justice.
