I’ve Visited 10 Times — and These Are the Best Spots for LGBTQ+ Travelers

Just past 11 p.m., flickering stage lights lit up a rainbow of colors in the crowd at Zurich’s lakeside Landiwiese park. Guys in tank tops and plenty of colorful wigs swirl about, with more than a few rainbow flags waving in the distance. Switzerland’s recently crowned Eurovision winner, the 24-year-old Nemo, who recently came out as nonbinary, walked out on stage to a thousand shrieks and cheers. In a long, pleated skirt and a pink, fluffy hat, Nemo’s funky fashion matched the fun atmosphere at Zurich’s pride festival.

Performing an eight-minute extended version of their winning song “The Code,” I sang along to the joyful lyrics alongside drag queens and other fans holding stuffed “Finding Nemo” fish. Their lyrics, “This story is my truth… to find myself on track, I broke the code…” rang through the audience. Their theatrical song details their experience of “coming to a place where I feel comfortable with myself,” they told me in a brief interview before going on stage. “It’s a very dramatic piece.”

In fact, Switzerland is a very dramatic place. Its mountains, the snow-capped Swiss Alps with thousands of glaciers, stretch upwards of 15,000 feet to the sky, while in the south, the country’s deepest lake creates a subtropical (and very humid) climate. With four official languages and in a place where you can experience all four seasons in a single day, Switzerland’s unusual structure of 26 regional governments (each with its own unique customs, cultures, and traditions) makes it an exhilarating place to explore. The country’s reputation for extreme individual privacy, secret bank vaults, and international neutrality fosters a sort of internal strife and drama, allowing for inclusivity and personal expression.

Zurich, and Switzerland in general, isn’t on your typical gay travel itinerary. However, with Nemo’s big win at Eurovision in May (only the third time Switzerland won; the last time was Celine Dion in 1988), Switzerland is suddenly on the gay map. Next year, the country will host the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, which is unquestionably one of Europe’s biggest LGBTQ events of the year.

I’ve been visiting Switzerland for the last decade. First, like many travelers, because I was captivated by its incredible nature, and then again when I discovered an underground queer scene in the picturesque Lausanne. When my sister moved to Switzerland a few years ago, that sealed the deal. It’s a place I love returning to because the nature here is ever-changing, and the LGBTQ nightlife and culture — now expanded with Nemo’s propulsion to the world stage — is continually growing.

Here are my picks for LGBTQ-friendly things to do and see in Switzerland.

Zurich

Switzerland’s most populous city, Zurich, has the country’s largest concentration of LGBTQ people. This year’s Pride festival had nearly 60,000 attendees; it’s Switzerland’s largest LGBTQ event of the year and attracts visitors from across the country and even more than a few LGBTQ travelers from around the world. I met a handful of other Americans who were on Eurotrips at the same time.

Zurich’s Altstadt neighborhood, divided by the picturesque Limmat River, which feeds into the expansive Lake Zurich, is where you’ll find the best things to see and do. The neighborhood is home to Barfüsser, which was one of Europe’s first meeting spots for LGBTQ people since homosexuality was first decriminalized in Switzerland in the 1940s. Members of Der Kreis (The Circle), an international organization for lesbians and gay men, produced magazines and held annual galas in the space up until the 1960s. That original location is now a gay bar, KWEER, serving cocktails, while Barfüsser’s namesake is a gay-friendly sushi restaurant just a few doors down. The cobblestoned Spitalgasse street is also home to an LGBTQ basement nightclub, Heaven, which hosts drag shows, sweaty parties, and international DJs. And the Rote Fabrik warehouse is another spot for queer culture — covered in graffiti and host to techno parties and the Zurich pride afterparty.

Elsewhere in the Altstadt, I love just wandering the streets for shopping and bar-hopping. Haus Hiltl offers a buffet lunch and holds the Guinness World Records title as the world’s oldest vegetarian restaurant. Just a short walk from there, you can reach the Langstrasse, another neighborhood with a concentration of LGBTQ spaces and nightlife.

Besides bars and restaurants, the Museum of Design (Museum für Gestaltung) has two outposts in the city—one of which offers tours through two basement floors of its archive of Swiss design posters, furniture, and typographic artifacts. You can also take a boat tour out on the lake, and if the wind hits just right, you’ll get the sweet smells from the Lindt chocolate factory on the western edge of the lake (where you can also take tours).

Lausanne & the Swiss Riviera

When you cross between the German and French-speaking halves of Switzerland, you’re crossing what the Swiss refer to as the Röstigraben, an imaginary border dividing the two linguistic regions. From Zurich, it’s only about 2-3 hours by train to Lausanne and then another 30 minutes to Geneva. Most of the country is easy to travel via train, and between cities, you’ll rarely spend more than a few hours on the train before getting to the next destination. I like to break it up, and even on the train from Zurich to Lausanne, I’ll usually stop over for a coffee and cake in Bern, then continue on my way.

One of my first-ever visits to Switzerland was to Lausanne and the Swiss Riviera along Lake Geneva (Lac Léman in French). The river Flon runs under the city, creating several valleys, or gorges, that make for incredible photos. Walking through the picturesque city center, you constantly move up and down among different hills and valleys. This elevation from the lake down below provides expansive panoramic views of Switzerland and France across the lake.

Home to the International Olympic Committee, Lausanne’s Olympic Museum along the lake has a nice garden and engaging exhibitions related to the history and future of the Olympics. For more nature, there’s the Lavaux Express Train, which takes you on a 90-minute ride through the UNESCO World Heritage vineyards just outside the city (great for a romantic day trip!).

Within the city, the hipster neighborhood of Quartier du Flon has plenty of artsy shops and museums. That’s also where you’ll find some of the better nightlife, including the gay dive bar Le Saxo and then the mega-club MAD, which hosts a gay party every Sunday called Gameboy. The Lausanne Cathedral offers that postcard-perfect view you’d expect in Switzerland. For interesting contemporary art exhibitions, the MUDAC (Museum of Contemporary Art) puts on a good show — I loved one particular exhibition on Swiss watches.

Geneva

Home to the United Nations, Geneva isn’t exactly known for being an exciting city. International politics and diplomacy keep the atmosphere here calm and relaxed. Like elsewhere in Switzerland, city life revolves around the lake, with the Geneva Fountain being one of the more iconic attractions.

The Buvette des Bains restaurant is located on a pier that juts right into the lake and serves one of the best fondues in Geneva. To keep with a relaxed city trip, the outlying neighborhood of Carouge is a pleasant place to stay, a slightly eccentric and colorful area with plenty of gelaterias, trendy bars, and outdoor cafes. I particularly love the club Le Chat Noir, which combines food, cocktails, and live music in a fun and gay-friendly environment.

Lauterbrunnen

Lauterbrunnen, a valley town between Interlaken and the Jungfrau mountain, is surrounded by steep mountains and 72 gushing waterfalls you can spot even from the train. Writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Goethe famously found inspiration there. During my most recent visit, I stayed in Mürren, a town further up the Schilthorn mountain, itself surrounded by 200 other mountain peaks.

Mürren is famous for its summer adventure activities, including paragliding; you’ll even find tours at cafes such as Café LIV (which sells killer hot chocolate). For the less adventurous, you can easily take a gondola up to the Piz Gloria restaurant and viewing platform at the summit, which has an accessible cliff walk with guardrails for some incredible views. Piz Gloria was Switzerland’s first 360-degree rotating restaurant, built by the producers of the James Bond movie for the 1969 film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

With Mürren’s tiny population of just 400 citizens, it’s a quiet place to stay overnight. The Drei Berge Hotel’s eclectic design of Alpine and mountaineering artifacts makes for a central place to stay in style, with beautiful nighttime views. There’s also a short 30-minute trail you can take from the base of the hotel down to Gimmelwald, where there’s a small brewery, Schwarz Mönch, selling a Swiss dark lager beer on an outdoor terrace looking over the Lauterbrunnen valley.

Ticino

Further southeast from the Lauterbrunnen valley and just a few hours from Milan, the lake resort towns in Ticino (the Italian-speaking canton) are a welcome escape from the wintery mountains. The lakeside town of Ascona on Lake Maggiore (Switzerland’s deepest lake) is an excellent place to stay for a taste of the Sonnenstube der Schweiz — the “sunny side of Switzerland,” where the climate is more Mediterranean than Alpine. Ascona is a sister city to New Orleans and hosts the annual (and free!) Jazz Ascona festival until 3 a.m. each night along the water for over a week each June. The sounds of live jazz, the colorful houses, and the fresh fish and risotto eaten outdoors make the quaint town the perfect place to explore the region.

From Ascona, you can take a ferry or private boat to the Brissago islands in the middle of Lake Maggiore. There, a historical botanical garden (and hotel) offers a pretty spot for a picnic lunch among 2,000 different species of plants and flowers from every continent. The islands have been passed down through various aristocrats over the last century but have always been a joyful place where “living is an art,” as Max Emden, one of the earlier owners, designated the place.

Away from the blue lake and up in the lush green mountains in Ticino, the tiny mountainside town of Corippo has a population of just six people. Since last year, it’s been an Albergo Diffuso, spread out across several restored buildings throughout the village, offering a luxurious resting place for hikers and thrill-seekers into cave jumping, river diving, and bungee jumping.

What You Need to Know

Switzerland is a welcoming country, and visiting it as an LGBTQ traveler is safe, fun, and easy. Getting around the country, you’ll want a Swiss Travel Pass train ticket, which gives you access to local city subways, commuter trains, inter-city trains, and even select gondolas and mountain railways. That makes it easy to check out multiple cities and explore more in shorter periods.

For upcoming LGBTQ events, the MySwitzerland website outlines festivals and prides, including Zurich CSD, a queer music and art festival for LGBTQ youth and even a gay ski week in Arosa.