Schellenberg
"It is the smallest municipality in a country most people cannot find on a map, and I had it almost entirely to myself."
Schellenberg is the northernmost municipality of Liechtenstein, which in a country this size means it takes roughly the length of a podcast episode to drive there from the capital. It sits at the foot and along the flank of the Eschnerberg, a low wooded ridge that rises out of the flat Rhine valley like a green island. Almost nobody comes here. The tour buses stop in Vaduz, photograph the castle they cannot actually enter, buy a passport stamp, and leave — and so the rest of the country, Schellenberg very much included, gets on with the business of being quietly, almost defiantly ordinary. I found it a relief.
Two ruined castles on a wooded ridge
The ridge holds the ruins of two medieval castles, the Obere Burg and the Untere Burg — the upper and lower Schellenberg castles — both built in the thirteenth century and both long since fallen into picturesque decay. You reach them on the Eschnerberg historical trail, a well-marked path that runs along the ridge with information boards explaining the Bronze Age and Roman finds that keep turning up in these woods. The walking is gentle, the forest cool and green, and the ruins themselves are modest — low walls, a fragment of tower, the outline of rooms where people once lived their entire lives.
What I liked was how little had been done to them. No ticket office, no gift shop, no rope keeping you at a respectful distance. Lia sat on a wall that had stood for seven hundred years and ate an apple, and a pair of local dog-walkers nodded good morning and carried on, and the whole thing had the unforced quality of a place that belongs to its neighbours rather than to tourism.
The night the Russian army walked in
Schellenberg’s strangest claim to fame is a piece of history I had never heard of until I stood in front of the monument that marks it. In the final days of the Second World War, in May 1945, a remnant of the First Russian National Army — soldiers who had fought on the German side against the Soviet Union — crossed the border here, into Liechtenstein, fleeing the advancing Red Army. Tiny, neutral Liechtenstein granted them asylum and refused, despite pressure, to hand them over to be sent back. A simple monument among the trees commemorates the episode.
Standing there, it struck me how much weight a small place can carry. A country with no army, that you can cross on foot in an afternoon, made a genuine moral decision on this unremarkable patch of border and held to it. Down the hill in the village I found the Biedermann House, said to be the oldest preserved wooden house in the country, and rounded off the visit the only sensible way: with a glass of crisp local white wine on a terrace, watching the light go down over the Rhine.
When to go: spring through autumn, when the Eschnerberg trail is dry and the surrounding vineyards are at their best. Pair it with the neighbouring villages of the Unterland — you can see the whole northern half of the country in a single unhurried day.