By Roger Boylan

12.16.2008

National Highway 1 spans Switzerland from the French border near Geneva to St. Margrethen on the Austrian border, a distance of some 350 kms (220 mi.). Known in the French-speaking regions as La Route Suisse, the Swiss Road, and as Schweizerstrasse in German-speaking parts, it departs from Bardonnex, in Geneva’s southern suburbs, snakes along the north shore of Lake Geneva to Lausanne and Bern and thence through the heartland of the Bernese Oberland and Aarau and on toward the Austrian Alps and the neo-Ruritanian principality of Liechtenstein.

Along the way the road offers some of the most magnificent views in the world, of vineyards, and lakes, and snow-capped mountains, and ancient castles, as well as some of the most mundane, of precision-machinery factories and fruit canneries and software plants and all the industrial muscle of modern Switzerland.
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