Deep in the Swiss Alps the Lauterbrunnen Valley, or Lauterbrunnental, is a deep cleft cut in the topography running between steep limestone precipices.The waterfalls that dot the rift often disappear into wisps of spray before hitting bottom, and include Staubbach Falls, one of Europe’s highest unbroken waterfalls at 270 meters.
Get to Lauterbrunnen, the village in the valley, by narrow-gauge train from Interlaken Ost station in the Bernese Highlands.
Lauterbrunnen is a municipality in the Interlaken-Oberhasli administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.
The municipality lies in the Lauterbrunnen Valley and comprises the villages Lauterbrunnen, Wengen, Mürren, Gimmelwald, Stechelberg, and Isenfluh. The population of the Lauterbrunnen village is less than that of Wengen, but greater than that of the others.
Lauterbrunnen was first mentioned in 1240 as "in claro fonte", a Romance language place name meaning "clear spring". By 1253 it was known to German speakers as Liuterbrunnon which by 1268 had the alternate spelling of Luterbrunnen. While the meaning of brunnen is undoubtedly spring or fountain, there is some dispute about the meaning of lauter: Some translate it as clear, clean or bright (which compares to the earlier Romance language meaning of the place mentioned above) while others translate it as "many" or "louder". A local explanation is that the name Lauterbrunnen means "many springs" using a modern meaning of the word lauter in German: however this could be an example of a folk etymology.
Lauterbrunnen lies at the bottom of a U-shaped valley that extends south and then south-westwards from the village to meet the 8 kilometers (5.0 mi) Lauterbrunnen Wall. The Lauterbrunnen Valley (Lauterbrunnental) is one of the deepest in the Alpine chain when compared with the height of the mountains that rise directly on either side. It is a true cleft, rarely more than one kilometre in width, between limestones precipices, sometimes quite perpendicular, everywhere of extreme steepness. It is to this form of the valley that it owes the numerous waterfalls from which it derives its name. The streams descending from the adjoining mountains, on reaching the verge of the rocky walls of the valley, form cascades so high that they are almost lost in spray before they reach the level of the valley. The most famous of these are the Staubbach Falls within less than one kilometres of the village of Lauterbrunnen. The height of the cascade is between 800 and 900 feet (240 and 270 m), one of the highest in Europe formed of a single unbroken fall.
