TTN

A Swiss family experience

Share  
Camp with the family at Tenero Lago Maggiore

Booking a family holiday? Suggest these outings and adventures to keep children busy and off their smartphones. Their parents will thank you for it.

Book a child-sized version of Switzerland: For something both the young and the young at heart will enjoy, recommend the Italian part of the country. The province of Lugano is home to a surprisingly enjoyable attraction at Melide. The Swiss Miniatur outdoor park features model replicas of the country’s finest attractions, such as the Heidi Village in Maienfeld, the castles of Burgdorf and Chillon and the Cathedral of Milan, the singular non-Swiss building and the only model that can also be seen from inside. Eighteen model trains travel between the buildings on approximately 3.5 km of tracks, but there also operating rack-railways, cable cars, suspension railways and ships. Nearby Bellinzona, located at the mouth of the San Gotthard valley, is home to two medieval castles, which will also find favour with children.

Send them camping: Arabs love camping, and myswitzerland.com has a range of more than 200 different campsites, in the Bernese Oberland, around Lake Maggiore and in the Valais region. These range from two-star to five-star, and are situated on mountain plateaus or by picturesque lakes. Depending on where your clients are staying, you can easily find them something.

Tell them to take a hike: There are yellow Wanderweg signs all over the country that point to hiking trails; there’s almost no chance of getting lost if tourists travel down one of these. The local tourist office can offer a map of the area (almost all of them are online), and with bucolic scenes of cows against green meadows and snow-covered peaks in the distance, there’s an Instagram memory moment everywhere.

Haslital has it all: Travellers who turn up their noses at yet another trip to the Bernese Oberland should be sent straight to the holiday town of Meiringen near Lake Brienz in the Haslital region. Not only does the area preserve many elements of Swiss folklore, making childhood stories such as Heidi come alive, it also pulls out all the stops to accommodate families. With mini-golf courses, tepee adventures, picnic areas with barbecues at the ready, and pushchair-accessible mountain bikes, nobody could want for family entertainment. Plus there are waterfalls and ravines to explore, the vintage steam locomotives of the Brienzer Rothorn railway, demonstrations of local crafts and a Sherlock Holmes Museum.

Spacer