We spent a few nights in Lugano recently - more soon about our Italy / Switzerland road trip - and between family engagements and travel had a day to ourselves to explore.
The main language spoken in Lugano is Italian, but there are also a fair few other languages you'll hear, including Swiss German, French and English.
After a lot of travelling the day before we didn’t get off to early a start, and drove 10 minutes from our accommodation to Silos Parco Ciani - an underground car park next to Parco Ciani. Google “Silos Parco Ciani” so you know what the round entrance building looks like. It’s not sure cheap - it’s about 2F per hour - but it’s a fantastic central location.
From there we walked into Parco Ciani, a large beautiful park on the very edge of Lake Lugano, with breathtaking views and some amazing photo opportunities. There’s an adventure playground there - you can find it via Google Maps by looking for Parco Giochi Ciani - and slightly further on a lake front “beach area” which we didn’t make it to, but which I think would be lovely. Just beyond that is a path to Lugano Marina.
Between the car park and the play park, there were signs for a Natural History Museum: Museo Cantonale di Storia Naturale. It’s a little tucked away - you go up some stone steps out of the park and past some University buildings but basically look for the signs; whilst we were there they were bright green with a photo of an eagle. It’s free to enter, and is closed between 12pm and 2pm. We managed to get there at 11:40am so only had 20 minutes to whizz around, and that was OK - especially with a toddler - but you could easily spend longer there if you wanted to read everything. The displays were very impressive for such a small free museum.
After that, we went to the play park, and then headed for lunch. Now, I hate to sound awfully uncultured - but we went to McDonalds. The kids were running a little wild - heat, overtiredness, brewing sickness bug, you name it. So we wanted to go somewhere we’d feel comfortable if they were a little rowdy. But also, when researching somewhere to go I’d stumbled across Maccy D’s and sent it to Tom for a joke… who’d actually thought it looked OK (and he’s not normally a fan). We knew the kids would love it, and Lugano McDonald’s is actually a bit swanky, with a rather nice McCafe too. So we headed there which was about a 10min walk from the park. For reference, a Happy Meal was around 7F.
After that we wandered around town, bought a rather fancy ice cream (7F) and saw some rather expensive chocolate (15F for a few small pieces).
By then, it was mid-afternoon so we headed back to the car, and went home via a supermarket (a large Coop, and we also saw a Lidl) to pick up groceries to go back and cook. If we didn’t have tired little ones with us, it would have been lovely to walk back to the lakeside “beach” and see the Marina before finding something to eat in some of the many appealing looking bars and restaurants.
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