Geneva | single master watchmaker | Joux Valley

Patek, which is among the most collectible watch brands on earth, produces about 7,000 different types of components for their watches' movements (including gears and 400 different types of wheels), and as I watch these perfectionists at work, it suddenly becomes very reasonable to me that the company's watches start around $7,700 and can reach a staggering three-quarters of a million dollars. For that princely sum, and after spending some time on the waiting list, you can purchase a watch from the Grand Complications Collection, which takes a single master watchmaker more than six months of full-time effort to assemble. No wonder they say time is money.

Swiss watches are justifiably famous, and the vast majority of them are made in one place - the Jura region, which starts in Geneva and sweeps northeast in a series of valleys that stretch for about two hours when driven by car. Known as the cradle of watchmaking, it was in the Jura region that wristwatches were born, and to this day, most of the fine watch firms in the world, from Rolex to Breguet to Vacheron Constantin to Omega, reside here.

In a very real sense, Swiss watchmaking is a product of the land and the people of the Jura. Despite the region's close proximity to the city, the valleys are rugged and rural and guarded by steep passes that used to be impassable during winter and which today even are still difficult. The hardy settlers of the Joux Valley, closest to Geneva and the towns to its north, lived off the land as farmers, but in winter, when the region was blanketed with snow and cut off from the outside world, there was no farming to be done. So the settlers developed other productive skills, and in their farmhouses, by candlelight, they became masterful builders of the then-popular music boxes, which required painstaking construction.