Schaffhausen

Schaffhausen exists because boats had to stop. The Rhine Falls just downstream — Europe's largest waterfall, a green-white thunder the town has been showing visitors since Goethe and Turner — blocked all navigation, so cargo came ashore here, and the transfer trade built one of Switzerland's handsomest towns: a centre of frescoed facades and no fewer than 171 oriel windows, the bay-windowed status symbols of merchants who wanted to watch their business go by. The Haus zum Ritter's painted front is the most famous Renaissance facade north of the Alps; above everything sits the Munot, the round sixteenth-century fortress built to Dürer's fortification theories, where a resident warden still rings the evening bell by hand at nine — a job with a five-century tenure.

The Allerheiligen abbey precinct houses the museum and a Romanesque calm, and its church anchors the town's proudest musical tradition: Bachfest Schaffhausen, the oldest Bach festival in Switzerland, which has gathered choirs, orchestras and scholars in the border town at regular intervals since 1946. The concert record's description — chamber concerts, church music, choirs and visiting programmes — fits a town whose acoustics are largely ecclesiastical and whose taste runs deep rather than loud. A waterfall for drama, oriels for watching, Bach for the soul: Schaffhausen made stopping worthwhile.