Vaduz is a village of 5,700 people carrying the cultural equipment of a city.

01 A capital the size of a village

The disorientation starts on arrival. You come in by bus, because there is no other way, and you are set down on a street with a hotel, a couple of banks, a bakery and a roundabout. Behind the roundabout the mountain starts immediately; in front, a few hundred metres of flat land and then the Rhine, and on the far bank, Switzerland. The whole capital fits inside a fifteen-minute walk, and most of what a visitor comes for fits inside five.

02 One street, and that is all

The centre is called the Städtle — literally 'the little town' — and it is a short pedestrianised run of buildings that holds, in a few hundred metres, most of the country's public collections: the national museum, the postage stamp museum, a ski museum, and the art museum. Nothing is more than a few minutes from anything else, which produces an effect you will not get in a larger capital: you can see a country's entire museum offer in one afternoon, without transport.

The absence of a railway station is worth dwelling on because it explains the scale. Vaduz has no airport, the nearest station is Schaan-Vaduz in the next municipality, and buses run in from neighbouring Swiss and Austrian towns every twenty to forty minutes. Nothing arrives here by accident. A place that is not on a through route does not develop the layers that a junction develops, which is why the town reads as one thin, deliberate strip rather than a knot.

03 The black box at the bottom

And then, at the lower end of the street, there is the building that makes the trip worth taking seriously. The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein was completed in November 2000 by the Swiss architects Morger, Degelo and Kerez, and it is a black box: a plain rectangular volume of tinted concrete mixed with black basalt, polished so that the surface reflects the street, the sky and the mountain behind it.

The choice reads as a deliberate answer to the setting. In a valley of pale chalets, red roofs and pitched gables, the museum is dark, flat-roofed and completely silent about itself: no ornament, almost no openings on the street side, no gesture. It does not try to be the biggest thing in the village — that job belongs to the mountain — and it does not imitate anything around it. It simply refuses to compete, which in a place this small is the only sophisticated move available.

This is the part that surprises visitors who came expecting a curiosity of a country. The building would be taken seriously in any European capital; here it stands between a bank and a bus stop, three minutes from a working vineyard, in a town with fewer residents than a large secondary school.

04 The vineyard in the middle of town

The other thing nobody warns you about is agricultural. Halfway up the slope, inside the built-up area, there is a vineyard: rows of vines with houses on three sides and the mountain behind. It is not decorative. The Herawingert covers about four hectares, is planted roughly 90 per cent Pinot Noir and 10 per cent Chardonnay on vines of forty to forty-five years, and has been documented as one of the best sites in this stretch of the Rhine valley for something close to a thousand years. It has belonged to the princely house since it acquired the county of Vaduz in 1712.

Grapes at 455 metres in an Alpine valley are not obvious. They work because of the föhn, the warm dry wind that comes down off the mountains and lifts temperatures sharply, and because the slope faces the afternoon sun. The vineyard is, in effect, a piece of climate data you can walk past on the way to the museum.

05 The castle you look at

Above all this, on the crag, sits the castle, and it is worth being clear about what it is and is not. It is the residence of the reigning prince — a private home, not a museum — so the visit is the walk up rather than the inside. The path from the town climbs through woodland in about half an hour and delivers you to the walls and, more usefully, to the view.

That view is the best summary of the place. From up there you see the whole capital at once — the strip of buildings, the vineyard, the black cube, the flat fields, the Rhine, and immediately beyond the river, another country. There is no horizon in which Vaduz is large. There is only a very small town, extremely well equipped, wedged between a mountain and a border.

06 How to take it

The mistake is to arrive expecting a city and leave in ninety minutes disappointed, which is what most day-trippers do. The right frame is the opposite: treat it as a village that happens to hold a national museum collection, and give it an unhurried day. Städtle in the morning, the museum properly rather than quickly, lunch, the climb to the castle, and the walk down to the Rhine bridge in the afternoon.

What stays afterwards is the strangeness of the proportion. Almost every capital tells you how important it is by being big. This one tells you the same thing by being tiny and unreasonably well built — a black stone museum, a thousand-year-old vineyard and a castle, arranged along one street, with the whole country visible from the top of it.