Liechtenstein

  

In April 2019 while I was on a work trip to Europe with the last leg at Zurich, I extended my stay and explored the world's 6th smallest nation, Liechtenstein. One has to be here to conceptualize how small it is. With only 24km from North to South, generally a 30 minutes bus journey had already taken me from its south-western border with Switzerland to its north-eastern border with Austria. The country bordered by the Rhein on the east primarily is an Alpine valley with mountain range over 2,000m in altitude.

Triesenberg


Triesenberg is a municipality of around 2,500 residents that perched on the slopes of the Alp mountains of Liechtenstein. Too bad the rain obscured the view or else the Alpine scenery would be more breathtaking.


The slope is too steep so after a hike up we need to follow a paved zigzag road to get down to village centre.

Glad Ricky accompanied me to explore this unique Alpine region.

Liechtenstein is quite a newly built country. Only when exploring its remote village we witness some defined style of buildings, Swiss-cottage buildings.

The Triesenberg village centre. Mainly there is a bus stop, a shop, a restaurant, a church, a post office, a library and a few inns.
 
Balzers



This Balzers village has a beautiful medieval Gutenberg Castle.

 


The castle is unoccupied.

View of the Balzers village. The mountain ridge is the border with Switzerland.

Lama?

Cherry blossom season. Beautiful.

Vaduz


Vaduz is the capital of Liechtenstein. Yet, it is too small to be considered as a city nor a town. Village is the more appropriate label. We walked from one end to the other in 30 to 40 minutes.


View point at the Vaduz Castle. This photo already captured half of Vaduz. Due to Liechtenstein's recent prosperity from being a tax heaven since 1970s, most of Vaduz consists of modern buildings, and it lacks the "old-world" feel of many European capitals.


Schloss Vaduz - Vaduz Castle, home to the royal family.

The castle overlooks the whole Vaduz and the nation's parliament and administration are right under it.

A 5 minutes walk on the pedestrian road one can see all the significant buildings of Liechtenstein.

Here is the governmental administration building. The parliament is the triangular building just next to it.

National Cathedral

Famous for its princely vault hidden treasures from Nazi.

Liechtensten info centre

She told us some national history. Since the establishment of the principality in 1719, Liechtenstein princes had not claimed its territory. Not until the fall of Holy Roman Empire,

the first member of the House of Liechtenstein set foot in his principality in 1818 while the next visit was until 1842. "Hey son, actually we own this piece of a country, lets rule it!"

Liechtenstein is famous for its stamps. (Perhaps there is nothing else here...)

Things are so expensive here and there is no signature Liechtenstein product. Postcard is thus my only souvenir.

The postal museum also archived drawing by the royalties.

The description are in German and simplified Chinese.

Old Rhinebridge. The only border between Switzerland and Liechtenstein which marked the border.

Technically I've been in and out of Liechtenstein many times, yet stayed only one night. Haha.

Visited a house at the central village of Vaduz.

The boys helped us to navigate, yet they don't understand English...
 

  

 

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