La Chaux-de-Fonds sits at nearly a thousand metres in the Swiss Jura, on a high, windswept plateau where the winters are long and cold, and it should not really exist. There is no river, no great harbour and no easy farmland, but the people who settled here in the seventeenth century turned to making clocks in their farmhouses during the winter, and the town became the world's capital of watchmaking. After a great fire in 1794, it was rebuilt on a grid pattern, with wide, straight streets that allowed light to reach the workshops and homes, and with the long, high windows that watchmakers needed. That orderly plan is why it is listed by UNESCO, together with its neighbour Le Locle.
Karl Marx called it a single huge factory town in Das Kapital, and the observation holds. The town's culture runs on precision, and its museum of horology is one of the best in the world, with timepieces from sundials to atomic clocks. Le Corbusier was born here in 1887, and several early houses he designed in the town, in a regional style quite unlike his later work, still stand. The Jura landscape beyond is open and green, with spruce forest, pastures and old farms with huge overhanging roofs, and horses that graze in the meadows.
For riders, the Jura is a gentle pleasure. The roads climb and descend through the hills in long, easy curves, with views of the Alps on clear days, and the nearby gorges of the Doubs river, which forms the border with France, are dramatic. The Saut du Doubs waterfall is a short ride away. The high plateau is cold, and winter can bring snow as early as October and as late as April, with the valley of La Brevine nearby known as the Siberia of Switzerland. In summer, the weather is fresh and often windy.
Fuel and food are easy in the city, which has about thirty-seven thousand people. Look for cheese such as Tete de Moine and Gruyere, and for the saucisson neuchatelois, a smoked sausage, as well as the absinthe made in the nearby Val-de-Travers. A Swiss motorway vignette is required for motorbikes on the autoroutes.