Jungfraujoch

The train deposits you inside a mountain, then surfaces at a glass-walled terminal where the Alps suddenly appear enormous on every side.

From the Sphinx observation terrace the eye sweeps across the Aletsch Glacier, the largest in the Alps, and a ring of 4,000-metre peaks that includes the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau themselves.

Even in summer the saddle between the two peaks is buried in snow, and the cold wind off the glacier makes the word 'arctic' feel accurate.

The Top of Europe complex — restaurants, a post office, and exhibitions — sits at 3,454 metres and is one of the most extreme locations any tourist facility occupies in Europe.

The Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage region contains the largest glaciated area in the Alps, with the Aletsch Glacier alone stretching 23 kilometres from its source at 3,900 metres to its valley-floor snout at 1,500 metres, a river of ice visible from the Sphinx observation terrace.

The Jungfrau-Aletsch region is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Jungfraujoch vantage gives access to its most dramatic alpine scenery.

The Jungfrau Railway is a feat of early 20th-century engineering: a rack railway partly tunnelled through the Eiger and Mönch that took 16 years to build and opened in 1912.

Standing on a glacier at well over 3,000 metres, surrounded by peaks that rise another kilometre above you, is unlike anything available at any other tourist destination in Europe.

A high-altitude post office and a cinema showing the construction history of the railway add cultural depth to a visit that is otherwise purely about scale and altitude.