Montreux

Montreux

The chief resort of the Swiss Riviera, Montreux rises in the shape of an amphitheater from the shores of Lac Léman. An Edwardian town with a distinct French accent, it has long been a refuge for expatriates in Switzerland, including novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Known for its balmy climate, it sports a profusion of Mediterranean vegetation which grows lushly in the town's many lakeside parks. The mountains at the town's back protect it from winter winds, allowing fruit trees, cypresses, magnolias, bay trees, almonds, and even palms to flourish.

The city has expanded greatly from its original 19th-century core, incorporating several former villages along the shoreline. One of these, Clarens, was used by Rousseau as the setting for his epistolary novel La nouvelle Héloïse. The resort enjoyed its heyday in the years just before World War I, when it had only 85 hotel beds, which slept such distinguished visitors as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Ruskin. In recent times, the town has revived, and today about three-fourths of the resort's 20,000 inhabitants are engaged in some travel-related capacity or another.

Montreux is a favored destination year-round and hosts a number of world class events including the famed jazz festival each July.

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