Zurich

The honest thing about Zurich is that there is less of it than its reputation suggests. The old town is small, the famous Bahnhofstrasse is essentially an expensive shopping street, and the best of the city is its setting — the Limmat running out of a clean Alpine lake, with the mountains showing on a good day. First-timers tend to make two mistakes: they block out three or four nights for what is really a day-and-a-half city, and they burn money on taxis and tourist-trap restaurants in a place where the train in from the airport costs CHF 6.80 and a supermarket lunch costs a fifth of a sit-down one. Walk it, ride the trams, take a cheap lake boat, and the city does its job well.

The smarter way to think about Zurich is as the front door to the rest of Switzerland rather than the trip itself. It’s the country’s main rail hub, so Lucerne is about fifty minutes away and Interlaken and the Bernese Oberland not much more — which means the right move for most people is two nights here, then on to the mountains by train. The structured planning below — where to base yourself, what’s worth booking, the airport train, and a realistic budget in pounds — assumes exactly that: a short, sharp Zurich stay that doesn’t pretend to be a week.