Published December 27, 2023
Although the birth of luxury timepieces is often associated with Geneva and Basel, the cradle of Swiss watchmaking lies deep in Switzerland’s Jura Mountains. Since 1748, the postcard-worthy Vallée de Joux has been producing world-renowned watch brands, including Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and David Candaux.
An hour’s drive from Geneva, the Vallée de Joux protects 26 traditional watch farms that scatter the hillsides, where watchmakers once spent long winters perfecting portable timepieces. Most of these watchmaking farms are no longer functional—climate change and the industrial revolution forced family businesses to migrate to larger factories in the city—but their multimillion dollar legacies prove that a slow artisan craft can keep pace in a hurried high-tech world.
“A watch is not just an object. People put their hearts into what they’re doing. It carries a little bit of soul,” says Nathalie Veysset, a watch strategist who works with master watchmaker David Candaux.
Thanks to a surge of dedicated blogs, influencers, clubs, and second-hand watch sales, the Swiss watch industry broke records in 2022, with exports rising to a all-time record high of $27.5 billion, due to a rush of luxury spending over the pandemic.
Many of the valley’s flagship brands have opened their doors to watch lovers from all over the world. Here’s how travelers can have an immersive horological experience—from visiting museums and workshops to participating in watchmaking classes.
The birthplace of watchmaking
Inside Olivier Piguet’s restored 19th-century watch farm is a cache of timepieces, with clocks, pocket and wristwatches, and drawers jammed full of spindly hands, buffed crystal, and rigid leather straps. Here, at the Centre d’Initiation à l’Horlogerie, travelers can spend a weekend experiencing the art of watchmaking. Students take to the benches, meticulously dismantling, oiling, and reassembling basic timepieces.
(The antique tools used to keep timeless timepieces ticking.)
Piguet, a 10th-generation watchmaker, says his family was one of the several persecuted Huguenots or Protestants that fled from France to Switzerland in the mid-1500s during the French Wars of Religion. Many of the refugees moved to the Jura Mountains as farmers. Meanwhile, others, many already skilled watchmakers, flocked to the city of Geneva, transforming the Swiss watchmaking industry.
“Historically, we have a reputation for top level quality. Our watches have been named the most complicated, the flattest, the smallest,” says Piguet. Since 2020, the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics have been inscribed on the UNESCO list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
By the 17th century, with the birth of industrialization, the valley’s farmers would send young family members to Geneva to study the watchmaking trade to help fetch extra income during the region’s harsh winters. As a result, farmers’ houses gradually changed to accommodate their dual lives. To maximize natural light, they opened facades and added gables to install massive sun-exposed windows for the winter—ideal for long hours of tinkering.
With a monopoly of natural resources such as a flowing alpine lake, rich iron deposits, and gentian, a brittle native plant still used with diamond powder to give watches a polished finish, watchmaking rapidly developed and flourished in Vallée de Joux. Visitors to the valley can see several of these watch farms via bike or on foot in the summer or on cross-country skis come winter.
Discover 200 years of innovation
Less than three miles from Piguet is Audemars Piguet’s atelier-turned-museum in Le Brassus, a village in the heart of the Vallée de Joux. Designed as a “living museum,” visitors can view watchmakers in crisp-white coats working behind a glass panel, their heads down and loupes focused. With the most complicated watches requiring a minimum of 648 parts, it can take a watchmaker six months to finish one piece from A to Z.
Over 300 watches form the brand’s collection, from ornate jewelry designed to conceal minuscule clocks to novelty releases from a 2021 collaboration with Marvel, where bejeweled Black Panther watches collected over $5 million a piece.
“Watchmaking was and is a really important part of the Swiss identity, even though only a small region in the country is involved,” says Carlene Stephens, a technology curator at the Smithsonian.
Travelers can pair their visit to the museum with a stay at the newly opened Hôtel des Horlogers, which features 50 rooms and suites with floor-to-ceiling views of the serene Risoud forest and a library stocked with watchmaking books.
(This veteran horologist shares the secrets of time.)
A few miles away in Le Sentier, the Espace Horloger museum uses interactive exhibits to highlight how watchmaking came to the region and the challenges the industry faces, from globalization to sourcing precious materials. For example, the discovery of quartz technology in the 1970s and 1980 shook the entire trade. The number of Swiss watch companies plummeted from 1,600 to 600, causing a reckoning for a craft encased in heritage.
“The companies that survived the quartz crisis remessaged watches in a big way, from one of accuracy and precision to something that every man wants,” says Stephens.
Nearby, Jaeger-LeCoultre, founded in the region in 1833, hosts tours, workshops, and master classes, including “Introduction to Watchmaking,” where participants don white watchmaker’s coats and manually make their own timepieces. Although the names of Audemars Piguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre remain among the region’s most reputed, Vallée de Joux has around 30 companies in the watchmaking sector.
About an hour’s drive north of Le Sentier, visitors can explore the historic watchmaking center of La Chaux-de-Fonds, home to Girard-Perregaux and Greubel Forsey, among others. The town’s Musée International d’Horlogerie, one of the world’s largest watch museums, holds more than 4,500 objects devoted to the history of timekeeping, as well as the technical, artistic, social, and economic aspects of the watchmaking industry.
Frankie Adkins is a freelance journalist and writer based in Cornwall. Follow her on on Instagram.