Celebrities
Many celebrities have stayed in Montreux Riviera. Whether due to political or religious reasons, banned or simply curious, they all fell in love with the region.
Montreux 
Freddie Mercury and Queen in Montreux
Freddie Mercury, the singer of the rock band Queen, settled in Montreux because of its serenity. He acquired a recording studio, where he made his last album with Queen: "Made in Heaven"....
Vevey Charlie Chaplin in Corsier / Vevey
Screenwriter and film producer Charlie Chaplin – the Tramp in "Modern Times" - settled in Manoir de Ban in Vevey. His statue on the lakeside promenade recalls his 25-year stay in the region....
Montreux Igor Stravinsky in Clarens / Montreux
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky came to the Lake Geneva Region for health reasons. He composed several major works here. The Congress Centre Auditorium bears his name....
Montreux Sissi in Montreux
Elizabeth of Austria, the empress who was popularised by a film series under the nickname Sissi, escaped the cumbersomeness of the Austrian court by travelling. Between 1893 and 1898 she stayed several times in the Lake Geneva Region....
Montreux Jean-Jacques Rousseau draws inspiration from Montreux
Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew the Lake Geneva Region well. A passage of his novel “Julie or the New Heloise” is set in the Montreux region, thus contributing to its romantic reputation....
Montreux Lord Byron
An enthusiastic traveller, Byron met his friends the Shelleys in Geneva in 1816. It was one evening, while entertaining themselves by making up ghost stories, that Mary Shelley was to invent her character of Frankenstein. Byron and the Shelleys walked around Lake Geneva, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s itinerary and visited the Château de Chillon which inspired his famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon”. On several occasions he stayed at the Hotel Byron in Villeneuve.
After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a brig and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords.
However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever and died in Missolonghi on 19th April 1824....
La Tour-de-Peilz Gustave Courbet
After the Paris Commune and the scandal of the Vendôme column, Courbet, like many artists, went into exile; he never saw Paris again....
Montreux Ernest Miller Hemingway
Hemmingway came to Switzerland for the first time in January 1922 and stayed at the “Pension de la Forêt” in Chamby. In his room in this Swiss chalet, he wrote several chapters of “Farewell to Arms”, in which he recounts his toboggan outings at Les Avants and his walks in the snow at the “Bains de l’Alliaz”....
Montreux Vladimir Nabokov
After the Russian Revolution, Vera and Vladimir Nabokov lived in exile in Germany, France and the United States before settling in Switzerland in 1961....
Vevey Fyodor Dostoevsky
When Dostoevsky left Geneva to settle in Vevey, in 1868, he had just lost his baby daughter, Sophie, who was barely three months old....
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