Paragliding Interlaken Above the Lakes
A tandem flight over the Bernese Oberland pairs you with a certified pilot for a smooth glide between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Paragliding interlaken launches from the Beatenberg slopes, giving clear sightlines toward the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau peaks on settled-weather days. Booking paragliding interlaken tours means your pilot handles takeoff, thermals, and a soft landing on the valley floor while you take in the alpine panorama.
Interlaken sits on a flat glacial plain barely 570 metres above sea level, yet the ridges that frame it climb past 2,000 metres within a few kilometres — a vertical gap that turned this Bernese Oberland town into one of Europe's earliest tandem flight hubs.
Paragliding Interlaken grew out of the sport's Alpine infancy in the late 1980s, when pioneers repurposed steerable canopies to carry a passenger alongside a licensed pilot.
The launch sites tell the geography. Most flights lift off from Beatenberg or Amisbühl above the northern shore, where morning thermals rise clean off the slopes. Below, the Höhematte meadow — a protected green wedge in the town centre — serves as the landing field, ringed by the peaks of Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. Between takeoff and touchdown a flyer drifts over the turquoise seam that separates Lake Thun from Lake Brienz, the two bodies of water that give the town its name.
The practice matured alongside Interlaken's older tourism trade. Victorian travellers came for the belle-époque hotels along the Höheweg and the rack railway to the Jungfraujoch; a century later their descendants come strapped into a harness. Curiosity about paragliding interlaken tours now spills across the internet, where prospective flyers trade notes on Reddit, replay helmet-camera clips of the descent, and puzzle over the weight limit before they ever reach the meeting point at Höheweg 125.
The equipment reflects decades of refinement. A modern tandem wing spans roughly eleven metres, its cells inflating into a semi-rigid aerofoil the moment the pilot runs into the wind. A reserve parachute rides beneath the seat, and the whole rig packs into a rucksack a single person can shoulder. On any summer morning the town fills with visitors clutching paragliding interlaken tickets, drawn by that same slender kit.
What keeps the town at the centre of the sport is topography rather than marketing. Few places on the continent stack so many reliable launch angles, so short a shuttle ride, and so photogenic a backdrop into one valley. That combination is why paragliding interlaken remains shorthand, among pilots across the Alps, for the archetypal tandem flight over water and ice.
1 hr 30 min
