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(All photos: www.juratourisme.ch)
The ViaJura runs from Basel through Delémont to Biel. If you do the whole distance, you will be on the road for six days – in the tracks of Goethe, it must be said: the noble poet chose this way south more than 200 years ago.
“One feels deeply that there is nothing arbitrary here, here an eternal law that gradually moves everything is at work and the hand of man has created only the convenient path that leads us through these mysterious places.” That is how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the landscape along what is known today as the ViaJura, as he journeyed along it towards the south.
The ViaJura is one of twelve Via routes in the Cultural Routes of Switzerland programme. Anyone who takes one will “stride out like a muleteer, be welcomed like a pilgrim, eat like a Roman and sleep like an archbishop”, as it says on the Cultural Routes of Switzerland website.
The path of the ViaJura leads through the valleys of the Birs and Schüss, over the Glögglifels pass at the entrance to the Laufen valley, over Mont Raimeux and through the Roman rock passage of Pierre Pertuis. This landmark of Roman times fascinated the artists of the Romantic period.
Delémont/Delsberg
You don’t have to be a sporting hero to take the ViaJura or individual stages of it under your hiking boots: all the routes are well constructed and safe and the routes themselves pose no particular challenges. Only the climb to Raimeux will raise a little sweat. If you want to avoid that, take the Post bus from Delémont/Delsberg to Vicques. That is what Goethe might also have done, in different circumstances.
ViaJura from Basel to Biel
Further information: www.kulturwege-schweiz.ch (Cultural Routes of Switzerland)
Accommodation
Claudia Fahlbusch
Miroslaw Halaba
