Schadau Castle / Gastronomic Museum

Where the basin of the Aare broadens out into the lake and an unexpected wonderful panorama meets the eye, Schloss Shadau towers up on the shore. The castle, a smaller replica of the château of Azay-le-Rideau on the Loire, was built in 1852 for the de Rougemont family of Neuchâtel. Since 1988 it has housed the Swiss Museum of Gastronomy (open: end of Mar.-mid Oct.), with exhibits of crockery, cutlery and kitchen utensils and mock-ups of interiors of some of the large hotels of the Bernese Oberland; temporary exhibitions are an additional feature. In the library the visitor can find rare cook books from Japan, Russia, China and South America, the oldest of which dates from the time of the Thirty Years' War.

In the park of Schadau is the Wocher Panorama, a larger circular painting (38 7.5 m/125 25ft) by Marquard Wocher (1760-1830) of the town of Thun as it was about 1810.