Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève: The oscars of watchmaking

Sport has the Olympic Games, cinema has the Oscars, and for watchmaking, there is the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève.

Each year the competition highlights the innovations of the sector and rewards its most eminent players.

The selected watches and clocks are on display in the Swiss city ahead of the highly anticipated prize-giving ceremony.

Breitling 

To find out the latest innovations being developed by watchmakers, Euronews went to the Swiss Jura, one of the cradles of watchmaking.

In the peaceful valleys where Breitling, the pioneer of the modern chronograph, was founded in 1884, it still manufactures around 200,000 watches a year here.

The brand is presenting four pieces at the Grand Prix, including two new versions of the emblematic Navitimer. The Superocean diver's watch has also been reworked by a new generation of designers, charged with taking the brand's heritage into the future.

"Our objective is to reunite the entire Breitling heritage. To extract the most iconic pieces, in order to build the current Breitling portfolio. We are surrounded by collectors and historians who guide us through the history of what has already been done. 

140 years of history is exceptional! So we take care to get out the archive pieces, to understand them, to analyse them. And, once we have understood the DNA of the piece, the values of the brand, of Breitling, we can begin to design from the brand's perspective." Explains Sylvain Berneron, the Creative Director of Breitling. 

Beyond design, the watchmaker has set itself a new mission: to achieve carbon neutrality and favour responsible materials.

A little further on, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a Mecca of watchmaking, another iconic brand, TAG Heuer, was founded in 1860. It also has 4 pieces