Ninety seconds on Palais des Nations
Book ahead and carry the passport itself. The tour runs about an hour from the Pregny Gate, and which rooms it reaches depends on what is meeting that day, which is also the reason the building is worth seeing.
An hour, a badge and a security queue is the shape of it. Tours leave from the Pregny Gate and go through working conference rooms rather than a museum, which is why the route is never quite the same twice: whatever is meeting that day is closed to visitors, and nobody is told in advance which rooms those will be. Security screening covers every visitor, so the instruction to arrive half an hour early is the real start time, and a passport in hand or a Schengen identity card is not optional. A quiet week shows more of the building. A busy one shows less of it and more of the reason it exists, and the second is the better afternoon.
Explore the rest of Geneva
A city built on three hills above Lake Geneva, steep enough that a metro line is really a funicular and bridges cross from rooftop to…
A lakefront town on the sheltered eastern end of Lake Geneva, warm enough for palms and cypress along a promenade of about seven…
A castle on a rock in the lake, held by the counts of Savoy from the twelfth century, with the vaults where Francois Bonivard was chained…