The Chapel Bridge Burned in 1993. What Lucerne Rebuilt Tells You How to Read the Whole Old Town

On the night of 18 August 1993, fire tore through the Chapel Bridge in Lucerne, destroying much of its timber and roughly two thirds of the painted panels that hung under its roof. Only the two bridgeheads and the stone Water Tower were spared. The people of Lucerne rebuilt their bridge in about eight months and reopened it on 14 April 1994. That fact, a medieval townscape almost lost to flame and raised again inside a single year, is the key that opens the whole old town. Once you understand why a small alpine city rebuilt a wooden footbridge that fast, you understand how to read every stop on the walk that runs from this luminous bridge to the grave Dance of Death downstream, along both banks of the River Reuss.

Why the bridge, of all things

The Kapellbruecke, the Chapel Bridge, was built about 1360 as part of the town's fortifications, and it is widely recorded as among the oldest covered wooden bridges in Europe. Today it runs about 205 metres, though it was once longer. That length matters less than what hangs inside it. Set into the triangular gables of the rafters are painted panels: the local artist Hans Heinrich Waegmann painted them in the seventeenth century, one hundred and fifty-eight of them commissioned in 1611, telling scenes from the history of Lucerne and Switzerland and the lives of the city patrons, Saint Leodegar and Saint Maurice. Of the panels still hanging on the night of the fire, only a fraction could be recovered and restored.

So the bridge was never only a way across the water. It was a public gallery of civic and religious memory, a place where the town told itself its own story every time a citizen walked to market. When the fire took two thirds of those panels, Lucerne did not lose a tourist attraction. It lost a stretch of its memory. The eight-month rebuild reads, then, not as civic pride but as something closer to grief and repair. Stand at either end and you are looking at something both very old and, in part, very new. That doubled reading, old stone and new timber held in one glance, is the habit the rest of the walk asks of you.

The fortress hiding inside the postcard

The tower the bridge leans against sharpens the point. The Wasserturm, the Water Tower, is octagonal, built of stone, and stands directly in the Reuss. It is older than the bridge, raised around 1300, roughly thirty years earlier, as part of the medieval wall that closed the town off toward the lake. It rises about 34.5 metres, and its story is not a gentle one. Over the centuries this single tower held the town archives, the cantonal treasury and store of war plunder, and, in its lower reaches, a prison and torture chamber. Prisoners, the records tell, were lowered into the dungeon on a rope.

The tower and the bridge together are often called the most photographed scene in Switzerland, and Lucerne Tourism records the bridge as the city's number one photo subject. Hold both readings at once, the lovely picture and the hard old fortress underneath it, and you have the interpretive stance for the entire route. Nothing in this old town is only what the postcard shows.

The painted squares: the town's living room

Leave the river and the walk moves inland into a chain of squares that gathered the life of the city for centuries. The Weinmarkt, the Wine Market, is the finest of them, ringed by frescoed merchant and former guild houses around an ornate late-Gothic fountain by the sculptor Konrad Lux, dated 1481. Its history runs into the story of Switzerland itself: citizens of Lucerne are recorded swearing allegiance to the Confederation on this square in 1332, the year the town joined Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. For roughly two centuries the square doubled as a stage for the Lucerne Passion Play, so well documented that a full stage plan of the 1583 performance survives.

The Hirschenplatz and Kornmarkt link on from there, their painted houses protected today as historical monuments. The Kornmarkt earned its name honestly: a public trading hall and granary was built here about 1370, and grain was bought and sold on the square. On its edge stands the Altes Rathaus, the Old Town Hall, rebuilt into a town hall between 1602 and 1606 by the architect Anton Isenmann. He gave it Italian Renaissance walls under a great overhanging Swiss hipped roof, one building holding Italy and Switzerland at once. The Small and Grand Councils of Lucerne met here until 1798, when the old civic order fell in revolution. If you want to plan which squares to linger in, the Lucerne walking tours hub lays out how they connect.

The dark mirror downstream

The walk closes on a bridge that answers the first one. Follow the Reuss downstream to the Spreuerbruecke, the Spreuer Bridge, sometimes called the Mill Bridge, where the river splits around the old mills. Its south wing was built about 1408; a flood destroyed the crossing in 1566, and it was rebuilt. Its name is plain and working: chaff, Spreu, from the city mills could be swept into the river only from this, the furthest-downstream bridge.

Look up under its roof and you find the reason the whole walk pulls in two directions. Running the length of the crossing is a complete Dance of Death, a Totentanz, painted by Kaspar Meglinger in the earlier seventeenth century. It is counted the largest known cycle of its kind, sixty-seven paintings originally, of which about forty-five survive. Death comes for every rank in turn, the pope and the beggar, the merchant and the child, all led away by skeletons. Where the Chapel Bridge is bright and reborn, this one is grave and unchanged. Two wooden crossings over the same river, beauty and its shadow side by side. Across the water, the pink Baroque Jesuit Church, consecrated in 1677 and recorded as the first large Baroque church built in Switzerland, gives the medieval town a Counter-Reformation face to look back at.

The full route is about 1.6 kilometres and takes roughly seventy minutes at whatever pace suits you. Because it is self-guided, you can stand on the reborn bridge as long as you like, skip any stop that does not call to you, and read the Dance of Death panel by panel with no group waiting. Start where the fire started, at the eastern end of the Chapel Bridge, and let the whole city of Lucerne open from there.

Sources

• Kapellbruecke, Wikipedia: construction date, length, the 1611 Waegmann panels, and the 1993 fire and eight-month rebuild timeline.
• Chapel Bridge and Water Tower, Lucerne Tourism (luzern.com): the Water Tower raised around 1290 to 1300, its 34.5-metre height and past use as archive, treasury and prison, and the bridge as the city's most photographed subject.
• Spreuer Bridge, Wikipedia: the roughly 1408 south wing, the 1566 flood, and Meglinger's Dance of Death cycle of sixty-seven originals with about forty-five surviving.
• Town Hall on Kornmarkt, Lucerne Tourism (luzern.com): the 1602 to 1606 rebuild by Anton Isenmann in Italian Renaissance style under a broad Swiss roof.
• Jesuit Church, Lucerne, Wikipedia: construction from the 1660s, consecration in 1677, its standing as the first large Baroque church in Switzerland, and the onion-domed towers completed in 1893.