Liechtenstein weather and the best time to visit

The wet season is the summer

Most European trips are planned on the assumption that summer is the dry part of the year. In the Alpine Rhine valley it is the wet one. June, July and August take 205, 208 and 220 mm - the three wettest months - while January and February take 119 and 111. Nothing here is dry: the lowest month of the year still runs over 110 mm.

Alpine summer rain is convective. It builds through the afternoon and breaks as a thunderstorm, which is why a wet month in these numbers does not mean a lost day - it means mornings are the reliable half of it, and that a walk planned for 2 p.m. is a different bet from the same walk at 9 a.m.

May to September averages 18-24 C by day and 8-14 C at night, and is the stretch this page picks. September, at 20 C and 149 mm, is the quietest of the five.

Read the rainfall column as the region's, not Vaduz's

One honest caveat about the table above. These are gridded reanalysis values, and the grid cell over Vaduz is tens of kilometres across - far wider than the Rhine valley itself, so it takes in the mountains on both sides. Mountains catch more precipitation than the valley floor between them, and the rainfall column here is correspondingly high for the valley floor.

The temperature column is the reliable half: inland valley temperatures come out close to station records. Treat the millimetres as the shape of the year - summer-peaked, never dry - rather than as what a gauge in Vaduz would collect.