Lauterbrunnen

Acclaimed by Lord Tennyson as "the stateliest bit of landstrip," the Lauterbrunnen valley is often ranked as one of the five most beautiful places in Switzerland (we give it the number-one spot). A Swiss Shangri-la, it encloses a nearly perfect set piece of earth, sky, and water. The mountains here seem to part like the Red Sea as two awesome, bluff-lined rock faces line the vast valley, where grassy meadows often lie in shadow as 1,508-foot rocky shoulders rise on either side. What really set this mountainous masterpiece apart are the more than 70 waterfalls (Lauterbrunnen means "only springs") that line the length of the 2-mi-long valley. Some plummet from sky-high crags, others cascade out of cliff-face crevasses, while many are hidden within the rocks themselves; the largest, the Staubbach Falls, were immortalized by Goethe, Wordsworth, and Byron, who described them as "the tail of a white horse blowing in the breeze." For scenery supreme, Lauterbrunnen clearly can't be topped.