The Cantons That Weren’t: A Trip To Konstanz and Liechtenstein

[Jubal]

The Cantons That Weren't: A Trip To Konstanz and Liechtenstein

The river-front at Konstanz.

It was a grey morning when I left Vienna on a westwards train bound for Konstanz.

The countryside of Austria was the first part of the journey – the journey from Vienna to Zurich can be made directly by train, and covers a lot of changing landscapes. Going through the lower rolling countryside of eastern Austria I saw a stork nest perched high on old chimney and, later, storks themselves in the fields, before the loop through southern Germany and the route to Salzburg started seeing higher, sharper, forested slopes cutting into the landscape and enclosing the view.

The later part of the journey, however, climbed into the Alps for real. Frosted slopes of snowy mountains with clouds clinging to the sides started framing the world around the train, and as we approached Innsbruck, black kites wheeled overhead. The snowfall was thick in the high passes, and picturesque snowdrifts covered the roofs of little villages. It was many years since I had last been to or through Switzerland, and whilst I grew up in some of the lowest-lying parts of Europe, I have always had something of a fondness for snow-capped peaks and the sheer vastness of a mountain landscape.

I avoided buying food at Zurich train station, a place which has the feel of a medium sized airport and miserably high prices, and instead waited and ate late when I arrived in Konstanz. Turning up at the city's little train station, just over the border into German, I headed to what turned out to be the most German speaking Irish pub I think I've ever been to. Irish pubs in the German-speaking world are strange for people from the British Isles to begin with, with a much more German-sensibilities approach to table service being an obvious difference, but the ones in Vienna are often heavily staffed by Irish migrants, whereas in much smaller and less cosmopolitan Konstanz the Irishness was conveyed by green theming and some aspects of the menu. It was a good place, nonetheless, and I headed off through the city to find my hotel.

Two great-crested grebes doing a courtship dance at Wollmatinger Ried.

Konstanz itself (often rendered as Constance in English: I have retained the German spelling here) has a small old centre on the south side of the river and lake, with the urban area sprawling almost seamlessly into Switzerland: the city was famously able to avoid heavy allied bombing in the Second World War by keeping its lights on at night, the opposite strategy to most German cities. This meant that the allies could not easily tell where Konstanz finished and neutral Switzerland started, making a bombing raid too risky. The city as a whole now crosses over to the north side of the lake and river as well, but the medieval small-streets centre is a rarity in German cities, a reminder of what much of Germany might still have had it not been for the forces of fascism, bigotry and hubris in the mid twentieth century. For all that extreme nationalism often harks back to the medieval past, its need for that real and complex history to serve its narrow, shrivelled worldview will often lead it to put what beauty remains from ages gone by in more, not less, peril. Never trust a fascist to preserve what they refuse to start by understanding.

The morning was brighter than I expected, and I headed for Wollmatinger Ried, on the edge of the city – I was staying for a conference in a cheap hotel rather far from the centre, but decided to make best use of the location by getting to the edge of the built area. The area is a wetland (a Ried literally being a reeded area), and is very indeed pleasant, though only a small part of the huge reserve is open to the public. Nonetheless an hour or so's walk down a track and back was very pleasant, with open wet meadows that included irises and numerous other flowers. For wildlife the area offered views of deer, the sound of raucous nightingale song, and great-crested grebes bobbing their heads at one another in courtship rituals. Black kites were also wheeling overhead in large numbers: a flock of tens of the birds could be seen high in the middle distance.

The tiny carved mammoth from Konstanz archaeological museum.

It started to rain as I wound back towards the centre, and I decided to head to the city's archaeological museum. Cormorants and a lone red-crested pochard paddled along the river, and buses rattled late down busy streets.

The museum's collection included a significant chronologically-ordered section, and a sizeable special exhibition on the nearby monastic island of Reichenau. People have lived in Swabia for many, many thousands of years, and some of their earliest traces have been found around the ancient lake-shore: the oldest artefacts in the museum include what is recognisably a tiny carved mammoth, made by human hands forty thousand years ago – so long ago that it was even before the last Neanderthals had died out. It is just under four centimetres long: a tiny echo someone made visualising a world and a creature that we only have an imagination of today.

Getting far closer to the present, the displays demonstrated how post-hole houses were built into prehistoric lake shores, and then the waves of stone carvings, early metal tools, Roman era pottery, and post-Roman jewellery and crafts that passed through Constance over the centuries. It is a familiar tale to a historian, but the beauty and the sheer reality of those crafts is always worth going to a museum for. Every museum has its own endearing quirks, too: in the case of Konstanz, it was that at least one curator was very clearly a big fan of Playmobil. Little cheery plastic figures dressed in an exciting and lovingly done array of historical costumes could be found regularly around the displays, demonstrating early Bronze workshops, the imagined setup of warriors detailed on the back of an early medieval lute, and the immediate aftermath of the breaking of a Roman-era pot.

Reichenau, the subject of the special exhibition, is an island just across the water from the Wollmatinger Ried, in the lake. A major monastic centre from the eighth century onwards, its foundation was at least apocryphally authorised by Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne – the exhibition included a 12th century forgery of his donation - and the site became a key religious and cultural centre for the region. A squat little model of a clearly Byzantine-style church and Venetian medieval boxes speak to the reach the monastery enjoyed, and its goldsmithing workshops were widely noted: it is possible that the Holy Roman Empire's crown of 955, now sitting in Vienna's Schatzkammer, was a Reichenau creation.

A Byzantine-formed model church from Reichenau.

Reichenau's peak as a cultural centre was probably in the ninth century when it produced figures like the poet-theologian Walafrid Strabo, and a little earlier the abbot Heito who travelled to Byzantium as a diplomat for the Carolingians in the 810s. Besides the records of their lives survives a delightful and more human remnant of the early middle ages, the poem of Pangur Bán, a cat owned by an anonymous Irish monk who lived in Reichenau, probably also in the ninth century AD. The monk's diverse notebook has survived – including notes on Greek translation and the Aeneid, but also astronomy and the nature of angels – and was on display as part of the exhibition, including the poem about his little white-furred cat and its love of catching mice.

For all the gold and written treasures of Reichenau, the post-medieval world saw changes that took the monastery into sharp decline. Konstanz itself was ruled by the local bishop as its prince through most of the middle ages, and the prince-bishopric took over Reichenau in 1540, shortly followed by it losing secular control over Konstanz itself to the Habsburgs extending their power in Swabia just a few years later. In a world where monastic life was no longer as culturally central and where its independence had been lost, Reichenau struggled until finally the monastery was dissolved in the 1750s.

I then had a brief run into the old centre before the conference I was there to attend began. A kestrel (living up to its German name of tower-falcon) squatted in a high church window, and I took a brief look into the old cathedral, the centre of the Diocese of Konstanz from the middle ages until that, too, was abolished in the 1820s. Until that point, Konstanz's diocese had stretched over parts of Switzerland and Swabia, much as it had before the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy. In the 1820s it was split between a German diocese of Freiburg and a Swiss one of Basel – not to rationalise along political borders but as a plan to stop a theologian Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg, who considered dangerously liberal, taking over the see. The new diocese of Freiburg elected von Wessenberg anyway, but he was eventually persuaded to step aside in favour of a compromise candidate with the delightful name of Ferdinand Geminian Wаnker, who promptly died in 1824, leaving yet another figure called Bernhard Bol to pick up the pieces. The cathedral fits well into its surroundings and seems none the worse off for its loss of strict status: around it, the little medieval-plan streets are just as pretty by day as by night. Finding lunch was surprisingly tricky, in that the bakeries I saw in Konstanz did not seem to have filled sandwiches as well as bread (something that their Viennese counterparts very reliably do) which was an interesting minor cultural difference.

A Swabian maultasche in Konstanz - one of the more local foods of the trip.

The Swiss mountains are visible in the distance from Konstanz: whilst the area immediately around the city is flat lake-shore, the presence of the looming alps is often very noticeable in the landscape, and Konstanz's position on the edge of something feels noticeable. The lake has not always been on a boundary, though, with Konstanz's centre an outpost on the southern side as it is today: early medieval Swabia had Konstanz at its heart, not its periphery, and extended across much of what now form the German-speaking Swiss cantons and indeed down as far as Liechtenstein. From the early fourteenth century onwards, the military success of a newly formed confederation between Zurich, Bern and Lucerne in counterbalancing Habsburg power in Swabia created a new political force in the southern part of Swabia and parts of upper Burgundy. Konstanz itself attempted to join Switzerland in the fifteenth century, after the Confederacy captured the region of Thurgau to its south which the city had previously dominated. The attempt failed: Konstanz was rejected by the less urban parts of the confederacy who feared more large city states joining and outvoting them. The city joined the alternative Swabian League instead, which covered much of what is today the German state of Baden-Württemberg - but the border could easily have ended up including, rather than excluding, Konstanz as part of Switzerland.

Next I headed to my conference, which was pleasant, with a good mix of different people with different angles on the intersection of history and game development. The campus of the University of Konstanz is a bit north of the centre and takes buses, which are not too infrequent in the city but are, as noted earlier, not always reliably on schedule. It's a nice campus, with meadow fields and trees surrounding the main group. On the evening of the first night, we had a collective dinner, at which I had maultaschen, the most Swabian dish of my entire trip. This is essentially made with minced meat between two pasta sheets, which is then boiled to create a sort of single enormous dumpling. It's worth looking out for if you're in an area that produces it: otherwise, much Swabian food is not unfamiliar if one is used to that of its surrounding regions, with schnitzels and seasonal asparagus and other such things very much in evidence on the menus.

The Kaiserbrunnen in Konstanz.

On the morning after the main day of the conference, I headed out for the station, passing back through the city centre and past various local landmarks, including the Kaiserbrunnen, a late 19th century fountain featuring various historical Emperors which was updated  in the 1990s with a considerably more tongue in cheek set of bronze sculptures. These include a group of 'sea hares', little rabbits with fish tails which are a popular feature of local tales and a term used for people from the north and west shores of the lake. More historically, there is a representation of the Peace of Konstanz from 1183 where Frederick I Barbarossa concluded a peace with the cities of the Lombard League here. It serves as another reminder that Konstanz is a border city whose past (like that of neighbouring Reichenau) often revolved around its central location and far wider reach – the fountain also includes a peacock with three mitred heads, representing the Council of Konstanz in the 15th century which ended the tripartite schisms in the papacy (and also notably condemned the Hussites of Bohemia).

It takes barely a minute to leave Germany once a train departs from Konstanz, and soon I was rattling along the southern lake shore, mountains to my right. During my train journey I had around forty minutes between trains in St. Gallen, so got a look at one of the smaller cities that lay within the canton system. Besides its height – St. Gallen had visible snow on the surrounding slopes, and indeed piled where it had been swept off station platforms – the place felt oddly familiar despite my never having set foot there before. St. Gallen does not feel enormously different to either Konstanz or Vaduz: culturally one could be forgiven for not really appreciating that Swabia has been divided for a few centuries at this point. Each locality has its own tales, of course: St. Gallus, the hermit founder of the Abbey the town grew around, reportedly rebuked an angry bear once who subsequently agreed to gather firewood for him and became his tame companion, and besides appearing on the city's arms there is a very cute little bear statue in one of the central squares. There was no time to fully explore the town, though, for I was heading towards – but not yet quite to – Austria, and to the southeast of the former Swabian regions.


When I reached Buchs, the easternmost Swiss rail station along the route to Vienna, I got off the train. The place I was headed to has no rail station of its own, so I walked there. I first had a quick look into the picturesque centre and shopping street of Buchs, with its little pink church and chalet-sprinkled mountain backdrop, and then I headed riverwards to the uppermost reaches of the Rhine nearby. There were stonechats down by the water and heavy-winged buzzards overhead, and on the far side of the river there was another country. I walked along a high bank with flower-carpets strewn down either side, and passed a couple of river crossings before heading over a very pretty covered wooden bridge - and into the tiny principality of Liechtenstein.

The covered wooden bridge to Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein is undeniably pretty: I crossed the border more or less directly into its capital, Vaduz, which has a wealth of green space running through it that gives it a mostly very open feel. The streams through the centre are especially pretty, and as I walked more or less directly into the town centre, a huge kite wheeled over the fields on the other side of the road. Vaduz is really little bigger than a village, though it boasts a range of quite fancy shops in the centre and there was a farmers' market happening when I was there. Despite that, there was something that was hard to articulate that didn't ever sit well with me: the place felt neither alive nor gently sleepy, but rather a bit boxed-up, the buildings a bit too fancy and polished, the centre designed to look sleek rather than characterful. There are some interesting pieces of public art, nonetheless.

Before reaching my accommodation I passed by the cathedral of St. Florin, dedicated to St. Florinus of Remüs who is largely venerated in eastern Switzerland. It would not be at the larger end of parish churches were it placed in my native England, but it is a pretty building nonetheless, neatly built in 1874. Probably its most prominent feature compared to an English parish church is the large royal box at the altar end. Curiously, it is the centre of an Archbishopric where Konstanz is not: Liechtenstein was carved off from its long-standing attachment to the Swiss Diocese of Chur in 1997, in another episode involving the church trying to shift problematic clerics around – in this case, moving the deeply conservative bishop Wolfgang Haas of Chur, who had seen thousands protest against his appointment there in 1990, to somewhere with too few people to care. It turned out that even some Liechtensteiners had limits, and in a rare display of feeling, over a thousand of them held a mock funeral march at his appointment and the choir refused to sing mass: since then Haas fervently opposed any increase of LGBT rights in the principality and collected around himself a group of ultra-conservative priests unwanted elsewhere, until he finally stepped down in 2023. A replacement has not yet been nominated, but the sense of Liechtenstein being Catholicism's dumping-ground must only be partially assuaged by its gain of a coveted archbishopric for itself.

A view of Vaduz, and the cathedral.

On that first evening, I also went to the main city museum: I didn't have the time for the combined ticket with the treasury (Schatzkammer), though when I explained this when buying the Schatzkammer ticket the subsequent day the people selling the tickets did kindly give me a discount. The city museum – really in some ways the national museum – has a range of artefacts from the principality's history, charting a range of everyday artefacts and the familiar stories of the ancient, Roman, Medieval and then developing modern ways of life. There is also a natural history section with various taxidermied wildlife, and a special exhibition section, which recounted the interesting lives of Christian Protten, a missionary from the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century with a local mother and a Danish father, and his wife Rebecca, born to a slave mother in America. Their stories were fascinating, though so far as I could tell from the exhibition, they never visited Liechtenstein. They were, it seems, not alone in failing to do so: the museum includes a fascinating range of historical maps of the region, just about none of which the counties of Vaduz and Schellenberg were important enough to be noted on.

One trouble with modern Liechtenstein, ultimately, is that it has rather little sense of itself: I struggled to find a sense of local stories, histories, or place while I was there. It is a political formation named after a building hundreds of miles away, created as the result of early modern European legal technicalities rather than anything specific to the place itself. Here that family must enter our tale: the Liechtensteins were nobles from Lower Austria, named after the castle of the same name just south of Vienna. Their purchase of the counties of Vaduz and Schellenberg, which form the modern country, was a political maneuver: because Swabia, to which they belonged, had no Duke, the counties were a direct holding of the Emperor, thus giving them a much-craved seat on the Imperial Diet. They did not live in the country they had purchased, only moving there in the 1930s after over two centuries of absentee landlord status. The area does not even have the quirk of being a country created in the family's image, because the family by and large have had little to do with the place except for what they could get out of it.

Liechtenstein's hermaphrodite and animal-formed votive figurines.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the Liechtenstein museum, for me at least, was the small collection of ancient Celtic votive figurines from the southern part of the principality. Many of these were hermaphroditic, with prominent breasts and genitalia, and others were in the shape of stags, boars, and warriors: the suggestion has been made that these were probably part of fertility cult practices in the pre-Roman era. Well, well before it was Liechtenstein, these mountains had a seemingly rather more colourful relationship with the people who lived in them.

Food in Liechtenstein turned out to be a difficult ask: one of the miserable outcomes of an overly wealthy clientele is that getting a plate of food and a drink for an evening meal anywhere will set one back about a minimum of forty euros. There are no truly specific local delicacies to speak of: the food is much similar to that of Switzerland or Austria, except more expensive. My first night was actually spent at an Italian restaurant, which I can recommend if one does have to eat in Vaduz. The owner came out and gave me the menu they happened to be doing that night verbally, I had a good glass of wine and some pasta with prawns, and I did get some mini dessert for free with the meal: besides the inevitable sharp price I couldn't complain.

The sharp prices of Liechtenstein's modern economy are the result of an exceptionally rich populace among whom a great deal of money flows – which, in turn, is essentially based on Liechtenstein's status as a privileged tax haven. This is the latest variant on the Liechtensteins' utilisation of their pocket country: the princely family have if anything increased their personal grip on power in the last thirty years, consolidating their ability to veto legislation and generally dominate the weak national legislature. The country, in consequence, can feel a bit exclusive for those without heavy wallets and fancier family trees than my own.

In the morning, in any case, I finished my tour of Liechtenstein's museums with the postal museum and the Liechtenstein Schatzkammer (treasury). The postal museum is good value for money, not least because it is free, and the people there were extremely helpful, including my aforementioned discount when selling me the Schatzkammer ticket. The Schatzkammer is essentially a one-room collection of Faberge eggs, which are pretty if you like shiny jewelled eggs but possibly overpriced for a ticket if you aren't so keen. Conversely in the postal museum there were a variety of interesting displays, including an exhibition with a variety of fun pseudo-medievalisms focused around how the castles of Liechtenstein appear on its stamps. Vaduz castle in particular is so very visible across Liechtenstein that it is about as much of a symbol as the country has. It was also where I was headed next: the museums behind me, I set off up the mountain.

Vaduz Castle: a nice building, if a pity about its (lack of) entry policy.

The first slopes up from Vaduz are mostly on well-made paths and gravel tracks, winding and not fast but not excessively steep either. The first stop going upwards was the castle and princely residence itself. There is a nearby observation point from which one can get a good view of Vaduz, but in truth the good part of the view is not the rather unremarkable settlement below but the wider view of the Swiss mountains opposite. I would have visited the castle, but it's closed to the public on the grounds that the family live there: in Liechtenstein even the one major visual symbol of the nation is largely closed to its people. The meadow around the castle was beautiful, though with a barrier to the road: it was largely covered in yellow-rattle, a hemiparasitic plant that taps into the roots of grasses and takes some of their nutrients. It did strike me that the princes living in a field of partial parasites might class as one of the minor ironies of this strange little country.

The next stage of the journey was up a long and winding path through high woods. These were not dissimilar to those around Vienna, with a lot of wild garlic carpeting the ground and some columbine flowers by the path in one place, though my phone was picking up a lot of firecrest song which I wouldn't have heard back in Austria. Firecrests are, jointly with goldcrests, the smallest European birds, but sadly the very high trees made it impossible to actually see any. I eventually reached the Wildschloss, which does cut a dramatic shape upon the mountainside. There are few standing walls, but they provide good shelter for a stop on one's journey and would be a good endpoint with excellent views for someone who didn't want to get onto the heavier walking further up.

After the Wildschloss, the paths became much narrower, just about wide enough for a walker but they would have been tricky to cycle and impossible for a vehicle. I noticed the first spots of snow: the heavy snowfall that had hit while I was on the train to Zurich a few days earlier had melted in many of the open areas, but less so higher up and under the trees. One curiosity on this stretch of the walk was a hairy snail, one of the species with natural hair-like structures on the outside of its shell, which was something I had never seen before: I wondered if it had some form of fungal problem before looking it up and realising that, no, the world once again contained things I had not realised were just naturally like that. I stopped on a high hay meadow and had lunch, with yet a third enormous mountain panorama laid out in front of me. A flock of little grey water pipits got up from the fields above me, scattering into the middle distance. One thing that had to be said for the day was that the views were genuinely excellent: looking across to Switzerland the imposing mountain line was now no longer something looming above but a wide sight stretching up and down the valley, resplendent in the sunshine.

A high mountain bird: one of Liechtenstein's ring ouzels.

The snow thickened as I climbed higher after lunch: some of the walking got genuinely difficult, with small root-bound tracks covered in heavily compacted snow that was quite slippery. Slowly making my way along single person width paths, and testing each step in front of me, I zig-zagged up further through the woods until I emerged into the higher open alpine terrain. By this point I had climbed around a kilometre from my start point down in Vaduz, and was at close to 1500 metres above sea level, high enough that there were a few real alpine specialists among the plant life. There are a whole range of birds and mammals that specialise in the high parts of the alpine regions: most of the best flora has its flowering in summertime rather than spring, and the snowy weather perhaps further reduced what I could see. Nonetheless, the patches of gentians high on the mountain are one of my enduring memories of Liechtenstein, one of the deepest and richest blues I have ever seen in nature.

I climbed up a small tower for yet another huge panorama, but decided against trying to ascend the peak as it was already late in the day and the risks of going further in the snow alone felt quite real after my slippery ascent. Even as it was, I reached my hotel well after 9pm. I headed down by the road routes, a longer path but a much less slippery option. On the way down a flock of ring ouzels: similar to blackbirds, these are very much an upland species with distinctive white rings at their necks and white feather edgings. I got dinner at a gasthaus that was open on the way – a small plate of filled pasta, which was good albeit as expensive as food tends to be there.

I was surprised at how bad the walking infrastructure was on the way down: whilst around Vaduz there are plenty of easy walking paths, a lot of the mountain roads lack a pedestrian pavement or a particularly accessible alternative walking route, and signage is poor too, which could be quite dangerous in some cases. The route was pretty, all the same, in a chocolate-box alpine sort of way, and I passed streams and cows and houses with rows of state cattle show award badges affixed to the doors. Another flock of ring ouzels and some more water pipits were to be seen in the meadows as I descended, and one larger bird – probably a large pheasant, though it could have been the much rarer and heavier built capercailie – hefted itself overhead as a last silhouette in the fading light. I passed the castle again, and soon found myself back in the lamplit streets heading for my hotel.

Leaving Vaduz in the morning, I had one last encounter with a bit of Liechtenstein's wildlife, as a little water vole paddled along a stream that ran through the middle of Vaduz. One thing that can be said for the way Liechtenstein has developed is that it does manage to blend nature into a semi-urban landscape quite effectively, though given the amount of money sloshing around the place there are undeniably more environmental improvements in its transport system that could be made. Water-voles are larger than their more terrestrial cousins, often known as water-rats as a result of their similar size, and this one was quite noticeable as a furred head just poking out of the water before now and again hiding in the thick stream-side vegetation.

I went downstream myself, towards the river, and Buchs, and the long railroad home.



The regions of former Swabia around the edges of Switzerland tell some complex tales of past and present time. They are edge cases by definition, perched on borders, but they are also central, part of wider webs of Imperial power and invested with importance as a result. Their streets and artefacts still show echoes of distant possibilities: a little mammoth from a world where Homo sapiens did not yet walk alone among humankind, figurines from when faith involved rather different attitudes to sex and sexuality, medieval streets that weren't destroyed by fascism. Passing through the cantons that never were, a constellation of alternative worlds felt closer, in some way.

Those stories continue: decisions after decisions are made both in how we remember the past – be that in a row of faberge eggs, a three-headed mitred peacock, or a row of playmobil bronze-smelters – and what future we build atop that memory.  How long will the justification of a centuries-old purchase keep the princes' doors closed in Vaduz? Will future scholars find Konstanz as open to travellers and scholars as it was to me, or to the owner of a little white cat a thousand years ago? Will we keep a world that the blue gentians of the mountains will thrive in, or will my record of snow in the passes stand as a historical curiosity for some future reader?

Possibility, you see, never ends: history is deafening with echoes, but it rarely hits the exact same notes twice. Today, and every day, we choose – and so all of us contribute, just a little, to the tune.

[Jubal]

Additional Photography

Places

Spoiler

Konstanz

A part of the centre of Konstanz.

The playmobil bronze workers at the archaeological museum.

St Gallen

The little bear of St Gallen.

Vaduz

The Rhine by Vaduz, from the Swiss side.	The cathedral and castle.
Art, I assume.	The 'Red House', another local landmark.

The covered bridge.

Mountain Liechtenstein

A view up the mountain from the Wildschloss.	The Wildschloss itself.
A path just above the Wildschloss.	One of the many mountain pathways.
A narrow, snow-packed path.	Mountains through trees.
A high mountain view.	And another!.
A path just above the Wildschloss.	One of the many mountain pathways.
Cows!	...and cow festival badges (if I read the term on them right).

Wildlife & Nature

Spoiler

Konstanz

A black kite near Konstanz.	A coot eating a dead fish.
Another great-crested grebe.	A great reed warbler singing in its natural habitat.
The huge flock of black kites.	An iris at Wollmatinger Ried.

Liechtenstein

Hemiparasitic yellow-rattle.	A green veined white butterfly.
One of the water pipits.	Deep blue gentians on the mountain.
The hairy snail from Liechtenstein.	The hairy snail going about its business.
Another ring ouzel: see the clear white collar.	And another one.
Some globularia or a similar type of flower.	Bell heather high up the mountain.
A little black redstart.	The water vole from Vaduz.

[The Seamstress]

Wow, I'm a little envious right now. The landscape & mountains look beautiful. Thanks for the report and the pictures! 

[Jubal]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! And yes, the pretty landscapes were very much a treat of the whole thing

[dubsartur]

Another bit of the Holy Roman Empire which almost ended up in CH is Vinschgau.

I miss travelling but I live somewhere that you would need a car or be willing to fly.

[Jubal]

I miss travelling but I live somewhere that you would need a car or be willing to fly.

Yes. I do fly more than I'd ideally like to, but I try to minimise it and generally that's for work (and seeing family 1-2 times a year). It's still very expensive to make really long distance journeys across Europe by train, sadly.