Switzerland

Brief History of Lausanne

LAUSANNE tends to inspire hyperbole. In a country of spectacular natural beauty it is the most beautiful of cities, Switzerland’s San Francisco, a city of incredibly steep hills that has developed tiered above the lake on a succession of compact, south-facing terraces. Vistas of blue water, glittering sunlight and the purple and grey of the looming, white capped Savoy Alps peep through between gaps in buildings or at the ends of steeply dropping alleys. Much of the city is still wooded, there are plenty of parks, and the tree-lined lakefront promenades spill over with lush, beds of vibrantly colorful flowers. Attractive, interesting, worldly, and well aware of how to have a good time, it’s simply Switzerland’s sexiest city. The comparisons with San Francisco don’t stop at the gorgeous setting. If Switzerland has a counterculture, it lives in the clubs and cafés of Lausanne, a fact which – odd though it seems – lies broadly within the city’s long tradition of fostering intellectual and cultural innovation. From medieval times, Lausanne has stood at the Swiss cultural avant-garde. Back then, the cathedral crowned the city the most influential of the region; it still sits resplendent on an Old Town hill, the country’s most impressive Gothic monument. After the Reformation, students flocked to Lausanne’s pioneering university, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, restless Romantics sought and found inspiration in the setting and the life of Lausanne. It remains a grand-looking city, full of shuttered foursquare mansions and ritzy shopping streets, and with its own glamorous lakeside resort of Ouchy; but, despite the looks, there are few cities in Europe that so actively value and support the pleasure principle. For decades, the municipality has generously subsidized art and culture of all shades, resulting in a range of festivals, live music, clubs, theatre, opera and dance to rival a more sluggish metropolis ten times bigger than 300,000-strong Lausanne. It would be an exaggeration to say you could find anything you wanted in Lausanne, but the happy combination of a long tradition of cultural experimentation, open and willing audiences and chunky public subsidies gives the city’s arts and entertainment a refreshing breadth. Aiding the dynamism, a defining feature of the city is its international population of students, attracted to the prestigious University of Lausanne, Switzerland’s biggest, and the French-language arm of the Federal Institute of Technology. Hundreds of language schools and private academies enhance the city’s reputation for learning, along with the world-famous École Hotelière, training ground for top chefs and hotel staff. An array of international study programmes helps to feed Lausanne’s uniquely diverse multi-ethnic makeup. This youthful spirit, and the city’s hilly aspect, have also given Lausanne a new role as European blading and skateboarding capital: when the sun shines, every public space hisses with the spinning of tiny wheels, and the Ouchy waterfront in summer echoes to the clack of skateboards. Bladers have been clocked doing 90kph on the city’s hills, and in the winter, after days of heavy snow when blading is necessarily curtailed, it’s not unknown to see the same intrepid characters skiing through the streets down to Ouchy. On a more orthodox line, since 1874 Lausanne has been the home of the highest Swiss federal court of appeal, and has also attracted many multinational companies, not least Philip Morris, who chose Lausanne as a base from which to sell their Marlboro, Chesterfield, Suchard and Toblerone brands to Europe and Africa. However, the feature which the tourist office has lit upon is that the International Olympic Committee has been headquartered in Lausanne since 1915, and has attracted to the city an array of world governing bodies in sports ranging from chess to volleyball; they tout the city as “Olympic Capital” and endlessly plug the rather vapid Olympic Museum. It’s a mark of Lausannois spirit that given the chance to host the 1994 winter games, the locals dismayed the municipality and the IOC by voting the idea down and embracing the annual International Roller and Skateboarding Contest instead.

Sites to See in Lausanne

Contemporary and classical dance, theatre and music are all represented in Lausanne by some of Switzerland’s best performers. The Théâtre de Beaulieu, 10 Avenue des Bergières (%021/643 21 11), is the main venue for full-scale classical music productions – the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande performs here regularly when not in Geneva – and is also famous as the place where the highly acclaimed Béjart Ballet presents new material every June and November. The Opéra de Lausanne performs at Beaulieu too, as well as at its home at 12 Avenue du Théâtre (%021/310 16 00), while the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne stages concerts at the Salle Métropole (%021/311 11 22), also the venue for many Béjartproductions. The arts centre at Rue Sevelin 36 is the home of contemporary dance, with continuous seasons of productions year-round. Don’t miss the cycle of free concerts – mostly, but not exclusively, organ recitals – in the Cathedral, every Friday evening from June to September, with extra concerts around Easter, Whitsun and Christmas. Plenty of cinemas around town show latest releases, often with afternoon shows in the original language (v.o., or version originale) and evening shows dubbed into French. The Cinématheque Suisse, housed in the casino in Montbenon park (%021/331 01 01) has a continually changing programme of non-commercial movies from Europe and around the world, sometimes (but rarely) with English subtitles. The Théâtre de Vidy, 5 Avenue É-Jacques-Dalcroze (%021/619 45 45) is one of Europe’s premier theatres, with innovative productions and extremely high standards – but universally in French. The city also has dozens of smaller spaces for classical and contemporary drama, and cabaret: L’Atelier Volant, 12 Rue des Côtes-de-Montbenon (%021/311 52 80) and Le Lapin Vert, 2 Ruelle du Lapin-Vert (%021/320 09 94) are renowned, while Théâtre de l’Arsenic, 57 Rue de Genève (%021/625 11 36) is a Flon-based alternative theatre venue.

With such a vibrant – and healthily subsidized – cultural scene, aided by an energetic population of young people, it can seem like there’s always some celebration or other happening in Lausanne. All summer long, the Ouchy waterfront hosts informal music events – from techno to chamber music to African dance – just about every weekend, and always free. Entrée libre pour un été is a summer-long programme of free music, dance and culture at various locations around the city, taking in such diversities as Friday evening organ concerts in the Cathedral and hip-hop/DJ acts staged during the late-August International Roller Contest, Europe’s premier skateboarding and inline event of the year, attracting over 100,000 skaters Lausanne’s biggest party is the Festival de la Cité held in early July, in many ways much more spontaneous and cutting edge than the Montreux Jazz Festival happening at the same time just down the road, not least because everything is free and out in the streets: the whole of the Old Town (la cité) is given over to live performance of all kinds – music, dance, drama, mime, and more. Both the best in their field and student novices vie for the promenading audiences, with performances starting at dusk and running continuously until the small hours on more than half-a-dozen open-air stages, with stalls all around selling beer and food to the crowds. If you’re in town at the wrong time for that, try and coincide with the Cully-Lavaux Jazz Festival, held in the wine cellars and medieval alleys of Cully village, 8km east of Lausanne, in late March; or the Fête du Soleil, Lausanne’s version of carnival held each April; or the Flon’s Atlantis Festival in May, devoted to leading electronic music and dance; or the Fête de la Musique, impromptu music in the streets and bars in mid-June; or the Fête à Lausanne, a weekend of fairground attractions in late June; or the Paleo Rock Festival, a mammoth event held every July in a field outside Nyon, which draws top-name artists and a crowd of a quarter of a million; or the Festival of Contemporary Dance, held in late September at the Sévelin 36 arts centre; or the Bach Festival, held throughout Lausanne over two weeks in early November. Finally, chilly January hosts both an International Circus Festival on the Place de Bellerive (held for the first time in 1999), and the acclaimed Prix de Lausanne competition and workshop for young dancers, an annual fixture since 1970 inspired by world-famous choreographer Maurice Béjart and his resident company, the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.

Lausanne’s city centre spans several hilltops, linked by bridges spanning deep, riverless gorges. Place St-François dominates the hilltop district known as the Bourg, formerly the wealthiest part of the city and still known for its up market shops and boutiques. To the north, the hill of the Old Town, crowned by the Cathedral, dominates the city, while expansion during the nineteenth century roped in more heights to the west and east. The whole of Lausanne’s explorable centre lies north of and above the train station, with Place St-François at the edge of a pedestrian-only zone covering virtually the entire Old Town. Walking is the best, and often the only, way to explore.

The train station looks over the unprepossessing Place de la Gare, continuously hectic with human and motorized traffic. A gap between buildings directly ahead marks the steep Rue du Petit-Chêne which winds up to Place St-François on the terrace above. Bedecked with bus-wires, buskers and shoppers, with traffic surging through, St-François – given the adenoidal nickname Sainf by the locals – is the heart of Lausanne’s modern commercial centre, dominated by the giant bulk of the post office and, opposite, the considerably more attractive Église St-François, one of the city’s landmarks. Bishop Jean de Cossonay invited the Franciscans to found a community in Lausanne in 1258; by 1272, they had completed their new church, which then stood at the centre of a monastic complex hard up against the southern city walls. However, various medieval fires took their toll, and in 1536 the Reformation arrived, the monastery was dissolved, and the building was cleared of religious imagery to become the parish church of Lausanne’s Ville Basse (lower town). Further renovations, not all in especially good taste, disfigured the interior during later centuries, and although the church remains an atmospheric retreat from the bustle outside, today not a great deal is left of St-François’ illustrious past.  The quarter in which the church stands, the Bourg, spreads over a narrow ridge between two gorges, and before the nineteenth century stood alone as a separate community, rather wealthier than those all around: the Rue de Bourg, today a somewhat glitzy shopping street rising steeply from behind the church, had much the same style in the past too, lined then with restaurants, inns and luxury shops. In the 1780s, the English historian Edward Gibbon lived in a house on the site of the St-François post office, right at the heart of the high society of the day.  A massive expansion of the city in the early nineteenth century included the razing of many of the old slums, the filling in of the Flon river – which followed the course of the present Rue Centrale – and the construction of grand bridges unifying the disparate neighborhoods of the city. Most dramatic of these is the Pont Bessières, spanning the yawning Flon gorge from the eastern top end of the Rue de Bourg over to the Old Town. In recent years this has become the favored spot for suicidal Lausannois to shake off this mortal coil, so much so that every New Year’s Eve the city posts guardians halfway along the bridge to make sure no melodramatic revellers decide to test out their theories of flight; it’s a tradition for locals to stop by sometime during the evening, warm their hands over the fire, share a tot or two and wish each one “Bonne Année!” A walk over the Grand-Pont, first of the bridges to be built in 1844, from Place St-François northwest to Place Bel-Air, can also highlight Lausanne’s extraordinary topography – stairs and alleys running off at odd angles, traffic surging along the valley road way beneath, the lake glittering below on one side and the Cathedral crowning the hill above on the other. Below the Grand-Pont, and also accessed by stairs leading down from beside the distinctive Bel-Air tower (Switzerland’s modest first skyscraper, dating from the 1930s), is the Flon district; once full of merchants and traders, today its warehouses have been converted into dance clubs, alternative cafés, galleries and theatre spaces.

Ways to Travel

Although the Old Town is compact, and flying crow distances across the city don’t look too bad, maps can only give half the story: in practice, days on end negotiating Lausanne’s mountainous gradients and cat’s cradle of valleys and bridges can get wearying. It’s likely that you’ll resort to the city’s excellent public transport sooner or later. A short journey of up to three stops costs Fr.1.30, while unlimited journeys across the whole network cost Fr.2.20 (one hour) or Fr.6.50 (24hr). A two-day Lausanne Card costs Fr.15, and gives free city transport as well as many discounts at shops and attractions around town, including twenty percent off museums, the opera and all meals at Manora on Place St-François, plus reduced entry to the huge indoor skate park on Rue Sévelin and free entry to municipal swimming pools. You’ll mostly be using the buses, many of them electric, which fan out from the centre to cover all corners of the city, routes extending to neighboring towns such as St-Sulpice in the west and Pully in the east. Most lines skirt the Old Town from St-François to Bel-Air to Riponne – only bus #16 winds through it. There’s also a metro: the steep Métro-Ouchy line (known fondly as la Ficelle, the String) links the Ouchy waterfront with Flon in the city centre, via the train station; the Métro-Gare shuttles continuously to and fro between Flon and the train station; and Métro-Ouest runs from Flon out to the university and Renens. At the time of writing, a tunnel was under construction to link Flon to the suburban train station under Place Chauderon, from where LEB operates commuter trains to Echallens. For details of the commercial boat services on the lake.  The station has bikes for rent as normal (daily 6.40am–7.40pm), but even the locals have to get off and wheel them up and down the city’s hills. Where they score is if you fancy a leisurely day cycling through the lakeshore vineyards either side of Lausanne, dropping your bike off in Nyon or Vevey and getting the train back to the city in the evening; or, conversely, taking it up into the hilly forests above Lausanne and then freewheeling down again. To blend in imperceptibly with the locals, rent some blades or a skateboard from the kiosk at 6 Place de la Navigation in Ouchy (July & Aug daily 1.30–7pm, April–June & Sept–Oct Sat & Sun 1.30–7pm; Fr.8 for the first hour, Fr.4/hr thereafter). If you have heavy bags and a equally heavy wallet, taxis are a good standby for conquering those hills. Most of Lausanne’s cabs come under the umbrella of the Taxi Services’ central computerized network; call 0800/810 810.

Hotels

Hotel des Voyageurs-With its pink stucco façade and window boxes, this hotel is situated on a quiet street in Lausanne’s old town. The 33 simply furnished, modern guestrooms offer satellite television and minibars and high speed Internet connections. Guests can enjoy a buffet breakfast, surf the Internet at high speed, or exchange currency all without leaving the hotel.

Lausanne Palace and Spa- Decorated in plush Louis XVI-style and set in the heart of Lausanne, this hotel enjoys unique views over Lake Geneva. Bright guestrooms feature black granite bathrooms and are complete with cable TV and high-speed Internet access. Guests can unwind with a massage, sauna and thalassotherapy at the hotel's impressive Aveda Spa and Beauty Center

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Moevenpick Hotel Lausanne- Bar/Lounge; Handicapped Rooms/Facilities; Express Checkout; Hairdryers Available; Mini Bar; Modem Lines in Room; Meeting/Banquet Facilities; No Smoking Rooms/Facilities; Pets Allowed; Restaurant; Room Service; Safe Deposit Box; Shops/Commercial Services; Fitness Center or Spa; Television with Cable; Laundry/Valet Services STARTING FROM DEC02 WIRELESS INTERNET/W-LAN

Alpha Palmiers Hotel-We have completely rebuilt the Hotel Alpha. The hotel combines stunning architecture with elegant interiors. The large rooms, with spacious bathrooms, are overlooking interior and exterior gardens, which create an oasis of verdure and quietude. Ideally located in the shopping / restaurants district and close to Lausanne's night-life, 4 walking minutes from the main railway station, and 10 minutes to the lake shore

Meila Carlton Boutique Hotel-The new Melia Carlton Boutique Hotel is a small and elegant 4 star superior hotel, located near the railway station of Lausanne and the Leman lake, 40 minutes away from the International Airport of Geneva. Lausanne is located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and it is certainly not comparable in size with the great metropolis of the world, but it has countless interesting spots, facilities, entertainment and events of all kinds, making it worthwhile to stop in this cozy city and to stay at the Meli¤ Carlton Boutique, either for leisure or for work. Lausanne is the capital of the Olympic Movement and is a true holiday town, but it also offers many opportunities for study, business, shopping, culture, sports and health treatments. Visitors will be close to all this in the Meli¤ Carlton Boutique, while taking part in congresses or seminars or while exploring the pedestrian precincts with their myriad of shops, with a camera or laptop slung over the shoulder. Visitors can also enjoy various museums, shows or night-clubs.

Information on this page taken from www.isyours.com and www.expedia.com 

This web site was constructed for a school project. Information was taken from the credited sites along with information from search engines. We can be reached at lpierson1@ucok.edu.