Heritage across Europe: how each country treats what it has inherited — Part 11: Switzerland.
Switzerland does not shout about its heritage. It doesn’t need to.
While other countries in this series have been navigating funding crises, bureaucratic complexity, and the consequences of decades of neglect, Switzerland has been quietly maintaining its historic buildings with the same methodical precision it applies to everything else. The results are not always spectacular — but they are, more often than not, correct.
That is not a small thing.
Bern — a city under its own arcades
Bern is not the most famous Swiss city. Zurich has the financial prestige, Geneva the international profile, Lucerne the postcard recognition. But Bern — the federal capital, quietly going about its business in the middle of the country — has something that none of those cities can match: one of the most complete and liveable medieval urban centres in Europe.
The defining feature of Bern’s old city is its Lauben — the covered arcades that run continuously along both sides of the main streets for almost six kilometres. Built from the 12th century onward, these sandstone arcades have sheltered the citizens of Bern from rain and snow for eight hundred years. They are not a tourist attraction bolted onto the city. They are the city — the framework within which daily life happens, where people shop and walk and meet, regardless of the weather.
The buildings above the arcades are predominantly privately owned townhouses, dating from the medieval period through to the 18th century, built in the warm ochre sandstone quarried from the hills around the city. Many have been in the same family for generations. All of them sit within a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has been protected since 1983.
The sandstone question
The Berner Sandstein — Bern sandstone — is the material that gives the old city its character. It is warm in colour, relatively soft, and — crucially for restoration — still available from the original quarries that supplied the medieval builders.
That last point matters more than it might seem. One of the recurring problems in historic building restoration across Europe is the unavailability of matching materials. The brick that was used in a 19th century Amsterdam canal house may no longer be produced. The limestone from a specific Burgundian quarry that supplied a Nancy Art Nouveau building may have been exhausted decades ago.
In Bern, the continuity of supply from the original sandstone sources means that repair and replacement can be carried out in material that is genuinely compatible with the original — not just visually similar, but physically compatible in terms of porosity, thermal movement, and weathering behaviour.
This is restoration done right. And it requires the kind of long-term thinking about material supply chains that most countries have not maintained.
Switzerland’s heritage framework — federalism in practice
Switzerland’s political structure is federal, which means that heritage protection — like most things in Switzerland — is primarily a cantonal responsibility. Each of the 26 cantons has its own heritage legislation, its own inventory of protected buildings, and its own funding mechanisms.
This produces variability. The canton of Bern, with its extraordinary UNESCO-listed old city, has developed a sophisticated approach to heritage management that reflects the importance of what it is protecting. Other cantons, with less concentrated heritage assets, may have less developed systems.
At the federal level, the Bundesamt für Kultur — the Federal Office of Culture — maintains the Inventory of Swiss Heritage Sites (ISOS) and provides a framework within which cantonal systems operate. Federal funding for heritage restoration is available for the most significant sites, channelled through cantonal authorities.
The overall picture is of a system that works reasonably well — not because it is centrally directed, but because the Swiss political culture of subsidiarity and civic responsibility means that local and cantonal authorities take their obligations seriously.
Private ownership and the Swiss approach
A significant proportion of Bern’s historic buildings are in private hands — the townhouses above the arcades, the residential buildings in the surrounding streets, the farmhouses and rural buildings in the countryside beyond the city.
Swiss owners of historic buildings tend, on the whole, to engage with their maintenance obligations seriously. This is partly cultural — there is a strong tradition of property stewardship in Switzerland that goes beyond mere financial investment. It is partly practical — the Swiss system of building insurance and maintenance standards creates incentives for regular upkeep that do not exist everywhere in Europe.
It is also partly financial. Switzerland is an expensive country, and the cost of restoration work is correspondingly high. But the wealth levels that make Switzerland expensive also mean that private owners are, more often than elsewhere, able to invest in quality work rather than cheap alternatives.
The craftsperson working in Switzerland faces a client base that is, in general, informed and willing to pay for appropriate restoration. What is sometimes lacking is the connection — finding the right craftsperson for a specific historic building type or material is not always straightforward, even in a country that takes these things seriously.
The watch and the wall
There is something in the Swiss national character — the precision, the patience, the attention to detail — that is directly relevant to historic building restoration. The skills required to maintain an eight-hundred-year-old sandstone arcade are not so different, in their underlying disposition, from those required to regulate a mechanical movement or calibrate a measuring instrument.
Both require the ability to work slowly, to observe carefully, to intervene minimally, and to understand that the goal is to keep something working — not to make it new.
Swiss craftspeople, in my experience, tend to understand this instinctively. The culture of Handwerk — skilled craft — remains genuinely valued in Switzerland in a way that has eroded in some other European countries. Apprenticeship is a respected route. Craft qualifications carry real weight.
A question to the Guild
Switzerland raises a specific question for craftspeople working with historic stone: the management of soft sandstone in an urban environment. Pollution, freeze-thaw cycles, and the accumulated effect of centuries of weathering create specific challenges for a material that is both beautiful and relatively vulnerable.
Has anyone in the Guild worked with historic sandstone restoration — in Bern or elsewhere? The question of appropriate consolidation treatments, and the limits of what consolidation can achieve before replacement becomes necessary, seems like valuable Guild territory.
Next in the series: Austria — Vienna’s Jugendstil and Gründerzeit apartment buildings, and what happens when an entire city’s historic fabric is in private hands.
RestoreFacade Guild — Heritage across Europe, Part 11 of 14.