Liechtenstein

You can hike the entire country end to end in a long weekend

Liechtenstein is a doubly landlocked alpine principality of about forty thousand people between Switzerland and Austria, ruled by a prince who lives in a castle above the capital that you can look at but not enter. It has no airport, uses the Swiss franc, and is small enough that the entire country has a single postcode range and about a dozen bus routes.

Vaduz, the capital, is a single main street with a surprisingly good modern art museum, a national museum and a stamp museum that is more interesting than it sounds, since stamps were once a serious chunk of the national economy. It takes about two hours, which is why most people treat the whole country as a stop between Zurich and Innsbruck.

The better use of it is walking. The Liechtenstein Trail runs 75 kilometres through all eleven municipalities and can be done in three or four days, and the high route through the Rätikon mountains is genuinely alpine terrain with hut-to-hut walking. Get above Malbun and the principality stops being a novelty and becomes a proper mountain destination.

Annual events and festivals

• Fasnacht (Feb) — carnival, with parades in Vaduz and Schaan and a Fat Thursday that shuts the country.
• National Day (15 Aug) — the whole country invited to the castle grounds for a drink with the Prince. Fireworks after.
• Little Big One festival (Aug) — an open-air music festival in Schaan.
• Alpabtrieb (Sep) — decorated cattle brought down from the summer alps.
• LGT Alpin Marathon (Jun) — a mountain race from the Rhine valley up to Malbun.
• Vaduzer Städtle Fest (Aug) — a street festival in the capital.
• Wine harvest festivals (Oct) — the Prince own vineyard is in the middle of Vaduz.
• Funken (Feb-Mar) — bonfires with a witch effigy on the Sunday after carnival.
• Christmas market, Vaduz (Dec) — small, alpine and pleasantly uncommercial.
• Sankt Nikolaus (6 Dec) — processions and gifts for children.