Le Locle, high in the Swiss Jura near the French border, is a town built for making watches. After a series of fires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was rebuilt on a grid of parallel streets, with houses and workshops designed to let maximum light into the rooms where watchmakers worked at their benches. The town, with neighbouring La Chaux-de-Fonds, was listed by UNESCO in 2009 as an example of urban planning shaped entirely by a single industry. Tissot was founded here in 1853, Zenith in 1865, and many smaller firms continue the tradition. Daniel JeanRichard, a goldsmith who is said to have founded the Jura watch industry, worked here in the eighteenth century.
The Château des Monts, a manor on the hill above the town, houses a fine museum of watches and automata. On the edge of town, the underground mills of Col-des-Roches are a remarkable sight: water mills built in caves, where the river disappears into the rock, used for centuries to grind grain and power machinery. The Doubs river forms the border with France just a few kilometres away, and at Les Brenets it widens into a lake before plunging over the Saut du Doubs, a waterfall about twenty-seven metres high, reached by boat or on foot.
The landscape is the high Jura: wide valleys and ridges of limestone, pastures, pine forests and farmhouses with huge roofs. At around nine hundred metres above sea level, Le Locle has long, cold winters, and the valley of La Brévine, nearby, is known as the Swiss Siberia for its record low temperatures. Summers are fresh and green, perfect for riding.
The roads here are quiet and flowing, with long curves through the valleys and climbs over the ridges, and views across to France and the Alps on clear days. The road down to the Doubs at Les Brenets and Villers-le-Lac is narrow and twisty. Traffic is light, but watch for cattle, cyclists and Swiss speed cameras. Le Locle covers the basics comfortably; fuel is often cheaper across the border in France. Try absinthe, which was born in the Val-de-Travers nearby, and local cheeses such as Tête de Moine and Gruyère.