Lauterbrunnen is a flat green valley in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland, about a kilometre wide and walled on both sides by cliffs 400 metres high, and seventy-two waterfalls come off those cliffs, one of them dropping 297 metres in near-freefall right beside the village. That one is the Staubbach, and it falls from a lip so far above the ground that the wind takes it apart before it lands; a short paved path climbs from the village to a gallery cut into the rock beside the falling water, where the spray drifts over you. Many of the seventy-two leap from partway up the wall rather than the top, because the side valleys were left hanging high above the floor when the glacier that cut the main valley melted away. J. R. R. Tolkien walked here in 1911, and the valley's name seems to have travelled into his books: the river of Rivendell is called Loudwater in English, an echo of Lauterbrunnen.
The valley is walked along its floor. A flat lane runs from Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg through meadows and hay barns, past the foot of one waterfall after another, and halfway along it goes inside the mountain: at Trümmelbach a lift built into the rock carries you up into the cliff, where ten glacial waterfalls from the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau thunder through a gorge hidden inside the mountain, up to 20,000 litres a second in July. From the valley floor a cable car and mountain train climb to Wengen, a car-free village on the terrace high above, for the view back down the whole trench. On the opposite wall, from Mürren, a cable route runs downhill along the cliff to Gimmelwald, 2.2 kilometres clipped to a wire with the valley floor 300 metres below your boots. The same cliffs make Lauterbrunnen one of the busiest BASE-jumping valleys in the world, with an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 jumps a year, so the figure falling past the Staubbach may not be water. From May, when the snow melts, every crevice in the walls becomes a waterfall of its own.