The International Museum of Horology

The horology museum sits mostly underground beneath a park in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the town that made watches for two centuries, and it holds several thousand timepieces covering the measurement of time from sundials and water clocks through to atomic standards. It is arranged as a history rather than a treasury: cases of movements opened out to show how escapements developed, table clocks, mechanical automata, marine chronometers, and enough Neuchatel pendules in a row to make the local style obvious. A restoration workshop works behind glass, so you can watch a clock being taken apart. Outside in the park stands a carillon of steel tubes that sounds on the hour. Labels include English.

What to look for

• The escapement cases - movements opened up to show how mechanical timekeeping developed.
• The automata - eighteenth and nineteenth century mechanical figures and singing birds.
• The restoration workshop - conservators working on clocks behind glass.
• The carillon - a sculpture of steel tubes in the park, struck on the hour.

When to go

Closed on Monday for most of the year. Two hours covers it comfortably and three if the workshop is busy and you want to stand and watch. The town sits at a thousand metres and the winter here is long, which makes the museum a sensible cold-weather destination, though the surrounding valley looks far better under summer light.

Before you go

Watches are small and the cases are dense, so the museum rewards slow looking and punishes tired feet; children lose interest fast. The underground galleries have no daylight and can feel airless after an hour. La Chaux-de-Fonds is a working town rather than a pretty one, and reaching it means a slow train climbing up from the lake.

Nearby

Le Locle and its own watch collection are ten minutes away by train.

Key facts