Rather like one of her most celebrated natives, Roger Federer, Switzerland has a charming modest streak. She is the quintessential Alpine country; one with an unarticulated soul. She is French without the shoulder-shrugging insouciance, German without the matter-of-factness, and Italian, but with impartiality.
To get an authentic impression of Switzerland, the Canton of Jura in the north-west of the country has it all, and not just the freshness of air, the purity of water or the drama of mountains. Coming from a family of novelists, it is often hard to separate fact from fiction, so I set out to the Jura region with two goals in mind: to see where my family, the Jacots, used to live, and to discover more about the relatives I had always been told about as a child, as well as the land from which they are from.
It was here, amid the rarefied and coffee-scented air, that I met one of two distant relatives in Switzerland; the other was in my home valley itself. I discovered that, as a result of inter-marriages over years, the same 10 or 12 families within the valley became interlinked, forming a complex web of connections throughout the entire Jura region.
The Joux Valley of the Canton of Jura is well-known for its watch-making heritage. The Swiss in the Jura region, who spent their summer farming dairy cows, found ways to keep themselves busy through the winter months via the painstaking art of watchmaking. The application, accuracy and precision involved in the creation of Swiss timepieces is a stunning tribute to mankind. You can see the current productions from the main watchmaking houses of the area at the Espace Horloger in Sentier.
If travelling brings out an instinctive desire for orientation via maps, culture and museums, then a visit to La Chaux-de-Fonds is imperative. Then there is the curious CIMA Museum of the Music Boxes in Sainte-Croix, where Genevan clockmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon invented a musical pocket watch in and is thus considered to be the inventor of the music box, and Sainte-Croix the mechanical music capital of the world.
