Le Locle is a small town in the Neuchatel canton of the Swiss Jura, situated in a high valley adjacent to La Chaux-de-Fonds, with which it forms one of the historic centres of Swiss watchmaking. The two towns are jointly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List (2009) for their grid-pattern industrial urbanism, designed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to optimise daylight and workflow for the home-based and small-workshop watchmaking trade that sustained the area for over two centuries.

Le Locle's importance to the watch industry is structural rather than merely historical. It was here, in 1844, that Georges-Frederic Roskopf founded the workshop that would later produce the "Roskopf" pin-lever pocket watch, the watch that brought reliable timekeeping within reach of working-class buyers across Europe. Le Locle is also the home of Tissot (founded 1853), Zenith (founded 1865, makers of the seminal El Primero high-frequency chronograph movement), Universal Geneve (originated in Le Locle in 1894), and Ulysse Nardin (founded 1846, today owned by Kering). It hosts the Musee d'Horlogerie at the Chateau des Monts, which holds one of the most important public collections of early Swiss watches.

For the jewellery trade, Le Locle matters as one of the two anchor towns (with La Chaux-de-Fonds) of the Jura watchmaking landscape, which in turn supplies a significant share of the high-end mechanical movement industry that drives jewelled-timepiece production. The town's industrial topography (long parallel rows of buildings with windowed upper floors for lighting the bench, narrow streets between them) was specifically designed for watchmaking and is still recognisable in the urban fabric.