The remarkably harmonious design of the Bern's old town, brimming with beautifully preserved 14th- to 16th-century architecture, has earned it a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The old town features four miles of pleasant arcaded walkways along streets dotted with fountains and clock-towers. Bern's 15th-century Gothic Cathedral of St. Vincent is magnificently decorated inside and its tower provides a sweeping vista of the city.

Bern has long been a firmly Protestant city. The main language spoken is Swiss-German. English is supplanting French as the favorite second language of the Bernese, but both are widely spoken, especially as the Bern canton is officially a bilingual canton (German and French), and Bern itself is only 12 km from the nearest French-speaking village.

For all its political status, Bern is a tiny city of barely 130,000 people and retains a small town’s easy approach to life. The attraction of the place is its ambience; traffic is kept out of the Old Town and you could spend days just wandering the streets and alleys, café-hopping and – if it’s warm – joining the locals for a plunge into the river. The perfectly preserved medieval street plan, with its arcades, street fountains and doughty towers persuaded UNESCO to deem Bern a World Heritage Site, placing it in the company of such legendary sites as Florence, Petra and the Taj Mahal. In a competition for the world’s most beautiful and relaxing capital city, it’s hard to think what could knock Bern into second place.

Of all Swiss cities, BERN is the most immediately charming. Crammed onto a steep-sided peninsula in a crook of the fast-flowing River Aare, the city's quiet, cobbled lanes, lined with sandstone arcaded buildings, have changed little in over five hundred years. The hills all around, and the steep banks of the river, are still liberally wooded. It's sometimes hard to remember that this quiet, attractive town of just 130,000 people is the nation's capital. Bern's old centre is best explored from the focal east–west Spitalgasse. As it leads away from the train station, Spitalgasse becomes Marktgasse, Kramgasse, and then Gerechtigkeitsgasse, but all the way down is lined with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, fountains and arcaded shops. Some 200m east of the station, the street crosses Bärenplatz, scene of much outdoor daytime drinking and a lively Saturday-morning market; to the right of it is the domed Bundeshaus or Federal Parliament Building. Beyond Bärenplatz, Marktgasse continues under the Käfigturm (prisoners' tower), a thirteenth-century town gate. Further along is an eleventh-century gate that was converted in the sixteenth century into the Zytglogge – a distinctively top-heavy clocktower adorned with brightly coloured figures that judder into movement four minutes before each hour. (To the left, in Kornhausplatz, is the most famous of Bern's many ornate fountains, the horrific Kindlifresserbrunnen, depicting an ogre devouring a struggling baby.) Münstergasse, one block south, leads to the fifteenth-century Gothic Münster (Tues–Sat 10am–4/5pm, Sun 11.30am–2/5pm), noted for the magnificently gilded high-relief Last Judgement above the main entrance and the elegant buttressed terrace on its south side. Its 254-stepped tower (closes 30min earlier; Fr.4), the tallest in Switzerland, offers terrific views of the city and distant mountains. At the eastern end of the centre, the Nydeggbrücke crosses the river to the Bärengraben (daily 8/9am–4/6pm), Bern's famed bear-pits, which have housed generations of morose shaggies since the early sixteenth century. Legend has it that the town's founder Berchtold V of Zähringen named Bern after killing one of the beasts during a hunt; the bear has remained a symbol of the town ever since. Bern's Kunstmuseum, near the station at Hodlerstrasse 8–12 (Tues 10am–9pm, Wed–Sun 10am–5pm; Fr.7), is especially strong on twentieth-century art, with works by Matisse, Kandinsky, Braque and Picasso, and whole rooms devoted to Paul Klee, who was born in Bern and who returned here from Germany after the rise of Nazism. More museums are grouped around Helvetiaplatz, south of the river: the Alpine Museum (Mon 2–5pm, Tues–Sun 10am–5pm; Fr.7) houses interesting displays exploring mountain culture, and you could spend hours in the fascinating seven-floored Historisches Museum (Tues–Sun 10am–5pm, Wed until 8pm; Fr.8); check out the "Dance of Death" sequence in the basement, and the fine late-medieval Flemish tapestries and weaponry.