The Bourbaki Panorama is a cylindrical painting 10 metres high and 112 metres in circumference, housed in a purpose-built rotunda. It depicts the internment of the French Bourbaki Army in January and February 1871 — nearly 87,000 French soldiers who crossed into Switzerland to escape encirclement by Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War. Switzerland fed, clothed, and eventually repatriated them all.
The panorama was completed in 1881 by a team of artists led by Édouard Castres, who had witnessed the events personally. Viewed from the central platform, the painting creates a convincing illusion of depth — a three-dimensional foreground melts into the painted scene, making it genuinely hard to judge where the model ends and the canvas begins. It is a masterpiece of a largely forgotten art form, and it tells a story most visitors to Switzerland have never encountered.