Vevey

Henri Nestle (born Heinrich Nestle, 10 August 1814 in Frankfurt am Main) was a pharmacist's assistant who settled in Vevey. In 1867, he developed his Farine Lactee, a mixture of cow's milk, wheat flour, and sugar designed as infant food for babies who could not be breastfed. On 1 September 1867, his product saved its first life: a premature baby named Wanner who could not digest mother's milk survived on the Farine Lactee. Sales exploded from 8,600 tins in the first year to over one million by 1875. Today, Nestle S.A. remains headquartered in Vevey as the world's largest food and beverage company.

In September 1952, Charlie Chaplin was aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth when the United States revoked his re-entry visa during the McCarthy era. The Chaplin family moved into the Manoir de Ban in Corsier-sur-Vevey on 6 January 1953, where Chaplin lived for the remaining 25 years of his life. He died on 25 December 1977, aged 88. A bronze statue of The Tramp by sculptor John Doubleday has stood on the Quai Perdonnet since 1982, and Chaplin's World museum opened on 17 April 2016 at the Manoir de Ban after 15 years of development.

The Fete des Vignerons has been held only 12 times in over two centuries: 1797, 1819, 1833, 1851, 1865, 1889, 1905, 1927, 1955, 1977, 1999, and 2019. The interval varies from 14 to 28 years, occurring roughly once per generation. The oldest surviving document of the Confrerie des Vignerons dates to 22 June 1647. Each festival spans three weeks with 15 events and involves approximately 5,000 volunteers. In 2016, the festival was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage -- the first Swiss tradition to receive this distinction. A temporary arena seating 16,000 is erected on the Grande Place.

La Fourchette is a monumental stainless-steel table fork, 8 metres tall and 1.3 metres wide at its tines, planted in Lake Geneva just 5 metres off the Quai Perdonnet. Designed by Jean-Pierre Zaugg and fabricated by Georges Favre, it was commissioned to celebrate the Alimentarium's 10th anniversary in 1995. Originally intended as a temporary installation, it was removed in 1996 after authorities denied permanent authorization, but returned in 2007 and secured permanent status in 2009 after a mass petition. In 2014, it entered the Guinness World Records as the world's tallest fork. The Alimentarium food museum behind it occupies the former 1920s Nestle headquarters.

The Lavaux vineyard terraces stretch for about 30 km along the south-facing northern shore of Lake Geneva, passing through the Vevey-Montreux region. Although vines were grown here in Roman times, the present terraces date to the 11th century, when Benedictine and Cistercian monks carved the steep hillsides into cultivable land. The monks built a network of stone walls stretching some 450 km, supporting approximately 10,000 individual terraces across 830 hectares. The dominant grape is Chasselas. Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007, the terraces benefit from a triple sun effect: direct sunlight, reflection off the lake, and heat retained by the stone walls.

Geneva-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau set much of his bestselling epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761) on the shores of Lake Geneva, in and around Vevey, Clarens, and Meillerie. The novel -- a tale of impossible love between the tutor Saint-Preux and the nobleman's daughter Julie d'Etanges -- made the region famous across Europe. By the 1760s, sentimental tourists traveled to Vevey with volumes of Rousseau in hand, seeking to walk the 'classic ground' described in the novel, arguably inventing literary tourism in the region. James Boswell visited in 1764.

On 1 March 1978, just weeks after Charlie Chaplin's burial, two men -- Roman Wardas (Polish) and Gantscho Ganev (Bulgarian) -- stole Chaplin's coffin from the cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey and demanded a ransom of 600,000 Swiss francs from Lady Oona Chaplin. Oona refused to pay, reportedly saying her husband would have thought the demand ridiculous. After a five-week investigation monitoring 200 phone kiosks in the region, police arrested the two men on 17 May 1978. The coffin was found buried in a cornfield about one mile from the Manoir de Ban. Chaplin's body was reburied in a concrete-encased grave to prevent future theft.

Oskar Kokoschka (1886--1980), the Austrian Expressionist painter, first visited Switzerland in 1910 and considered the Lake Geneva region his 'spiritual homeland'. In 1951, he purchased a plot in Villeneuve (a few kilometres east of Vevey) and built a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, moving in permanently in 1953. He lived there for 27 years -- the longest he ever resided in one place -- until his death in Montreux on 22 February 1980, aged 93. The Fondation Oskar Kokoschka is housed within the Musee Jenisch in Vevey, which holds the world's largest collection of his works.