Switzerland Guide
The Arc Jurassien
La Chaux-de-Fonds
La Chaux-de-Fonds is an oddity. Burned to the ground in 1794, the town was rebuilt on a grid system, characterized by enormously long, very broad parallel boulevards. This feature, combined with the municipality's taste for postmodern glass towers, has given La Chaux-de-Fonds the rather unfortunate air of a new town transported from somewhere in anonymous Middle America. Strangest of all, however, is the fact that this rather unprepossessing place was once a household name across Europe, the humming centre of the Swiss watchmaking industry, which in its heyday of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely responsible for establishing Switzerland's reputation for producing refined luxury goods of the highest quality.
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