Alpine business park

Neither of us had much expectation of Lichtenstein, so would our visit fill in the gaps?

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It is one of those places you are aware of, and we were quite intrigued, and it is just a 60 km detour. We have been doing a lot in Dora, clocking up the kilometres, and we could do with half a day out in the fresh air. Last night we found a tolerated parking space next to the stadium, and you really cannot argue at 6 Swiss francs. I awoke early, the rising sun across the adjacent hill-scape a particularly beautiful start to the day, but  I still went back to bed.

So what is Lichtenstein? Well quite frankly a business park.

Every building is practically new, apart from one that isn’t, which we will visit later. Most of the buildings are small scale, three to four storey offices.

We get the impression, that this place is probably the tax haven for the Swiss that want to avoid all the regulation and lack of secrecy that is prevalent in their home country. Pretty ironic really, a tax haven of tax havens.

And the buildings have that modern international style, some of refined simplicity versus those with nonsensical form making that has no advantage to the building, no relationship to its function of efficiency, but looks to have everything to do with making so called pretty patterns, ‘we do it because we can’ attitude, which doesn’t mean that you should! Must be bloody irritating to clean.

We parked up Dora, which is free for the first hour, and wandered into town, a pedestrianized utopian high-street.

Every other building is a museum, all brand new. This tax haven business must be quite lucrative for the local administration, and with a population of just 36000 people, put this into context, Tunbridge wells has a population of 56,000 and Talavera 90,000. They get quite a lot of museums to see at the weekend. I quite liked this building, with all its brick.

This is quite a nice step detail, that creates a lovely facetted shadow, not sure it tis that safe to use though.

These sun shades using just one brick wide, all very delicate, but must be reinforced somehow.

And everywhere you look are scattered pieces of modern sculpture.

It is one way to brighten up your high street.

Many seem vaguely familiar, but we do not recognise the names of the artists.

I really wish that building had been open so that we could see inside.

An old building, but this is not the famous one, that is for later. In front of this was a rather strange interactive exhibition.

It was all in German, so it took the young people there, manning the kiosk to explain it to us. Apparently it was about income inequality, male to female across Europe. A fascinating study, with Germany and Austria at the bottom of the list, and Slovenia pretty much achieving equality, and Italy also doing really well.

Unfortunately it was one of those surveys that failed to come to any reasoning or conclusions. Why was Germany so bad and Italy so good? We also imagined that the Nordic countries would be pretty equal, not so according to this research.

Statistics have always to be taken with a pinch of salt. Numbers can easy be manipulated, they may be comparing data from different periods, excluding populations sectors, etc. They may not tell the whole truth but they make good headlines. SM

And there is that old building, perched on the hill high above us, we must walk up there to pay it a visit.

Quite like the simplicity of the cladding and window module here. So what is it that wants to make all these companies set up in Lichtenstein? One does begin to wonder. Is it low rates of taxation or secrecy? Whatever it is, there seems to be a lot of them based here.

Our parking ticket is running out of time, so we go to renew it, another free hour, I am not sure if you are meant to do that . We are looking for a free Wi-fi place so we can check our emails. The local museum has a coffee for 5 Swiss francs, we are not paying that, we will have to stay unconnected for another day or two!

Surprisingly this place does seem to attract quite a lot of curious visitors. It is also well and truly on the Asian European tour. The local businesses seem to have realised this and every other restaurant is offering Asian food, and obviously it is packed with them scoffing down noodles.

It does beg the question of, why bother travelling. I always thought that experience in the food was part of experiencing the culture. It would appear that this is not so. We want to gawp at the sites, but we want our food. Why not just buy a DVD or watch a bit of YouTube on your smartphone!

We start the short climb up to the castle. The locals also seem to be living well here, beautiful bit of modernism.

At 25km by 12km this is about the extent of Lichtenstein in this photograph.

And as a visitor attraction, this one is pretty poor, you can’t even get to go inside. This is the residence of Prince Hans Adam II, who in 2003 won sweeping powers to dismiss the elected government and run the country. He has now handed over the running of the principality to his son. Who knew we had a dictatorship right in the centre of Europe.

Yeah, but it is a Swiss dictatorship; moderate, reasonable, pacified…SM

I have never understood monarchy and why anyone would support it. Don’t get me wrong, there are serious deficiencies with democracy, but how someone is best placed to run a country solely because they have come from a certain family. When you look at the half-wits that are part of the British royal family you cringe and although they have no role in running the country, they still have far too much influence.

The prince’s garden.

How the other half live!

On the way back down with pass a group of Brits struggling with the hill. One says “Don’t bother going any further, the best view is from here, anyway, I can email you a photo”, couldn’t agree more.

So that was our visit to the principality that is Lichtenstein, most bizarre and raises a lot more questions than it answers, but probably doesn’t deserve the research to find out more.

We head off down the valley, with a  whole lot more travel today, but that is for the next post…so over to Susana.

GDR