Before Liechtenstein existed, there were Vaduz and Schellenberg: two small territories in the upper Rhine valley. In Antiquity they belonged to the Roman province of Raetia, and in the Middle Ages they lay within the Holy Roman Empire. People lived in the area from very early times, with finds going back thousands of years. Under Rome it was a land of passage and of garrisons guarding the Alpine roads against Germanic raids.
The County of Vaduz took shape around 1342, when it split off from the larger County of Werdenberg. Together with the Lordship of Schellenberg, further north, it had one feature that would prove decisive later on. Both enjoyed what was called 'imperial immediacy' (Reichsunmittelbarkeit), which meant they answered directly to the emperor and to no one else. There was no duke or bishop in between, only the head of the Empire himself.
In the 16th and 17th centuries both territories belonged to the Counts of Hohenems. The family ended up ruined by debts and by trials linked to the region's witch hunts, which left the population poor and resentful. That ruin put Vaduz and Schellenberg up for sale just as another family, far richer and more ambitious, was looking for exactly that: a free territory subject only to the emperor.
The House of Liechtenstein was one of the richest dynasties of the Austrian nobility. It took its name from Liechtenstein Castle near Vienna, which the family had owned since the 12th century, and over the generations it had built up enormous estates in Austria, Moravia and Bohemia. But it had a problem of status. It held all those lands as a vassal of other lords, so however rich it was, it had no right to a seat in the Imperial Diet (the Reichstag), the great council of the Empire's princes. To sit there, you had to own a territory with imperial immediacy.
That is where Vaduz and Schellenberg came in. Prince Johann Adam Andreas I of Liechtenstein bought the Lordship of Schellenberg from the ruined Counts of Hohenems in 1699 for about 115,000 florins, and the County of Vaduz in 1712 for about 184,000 florins. He did not care about those poor mountains as farmland. They were among the least productive lands the family owned. What mattered was what they stood for: the key to the club of the Empire's sovereign princes.
Johann Adam Andreas died in 1712, the same year he completed the purchase of Vaduz, with no male heir. It was his successor who finished the job. The family had chased this goal for almost a century, and now it held the two pieces it needed.
On 23 January 1719, Emperor Charles VI signed the decree that joined the County of Vaduz and the Lordship of Schellenberg into a single entity and raised it to the rank of principality. It took the name of the family that owned it: Liechtenstein. Strictly speaking it was an administrative act of the Holy Roman Empire, but it is the birth date of the country that still exists today. The reigning prince at the time was Anton Florian, who at last won his house the seat among the Empire's princes it had wanted for so long.
One detail says a lot about the country's origins: for more than a hundred years, the princes of Liechtenstein ruled their principality without ever setting foot in it. They lived in Vienna, between the imperial court and their vast estates in Bohemia and Moravia, and ran Vaduz from a distance through officials. To them the territory was a prestigious title and a ticket into imperial politics, not a home. The first prince to actually visit his Alpine lands did so only in 1818, almost a century after the founding.
Meanwhile, life for the few thousand peasants of Vaduz and Schellenberg went on at subsistence pace: mountain farming, livestock, chronic poverty and a distant relationship with lords they hardly ever saw. That contrast between the family's grandeur and the territory's poverty would shape the country for generations.
The Napoleonic earthquake redrew the map of Europe and changed Liechtenstein's status along the way. In 1806 Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, which had existed for a thousand years, and reorganised the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine under his control. Liechtenstein was brought into that confederation and, oddly enough, came out ahead. Once the Empire it depended on was gone, the principality became a fully sovereign state. This was the moment Liechtenstein stopped being a piece of the Empire and became, technically, an independent country.
After Napoleon's fall, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 put the map in order again. Liechtenstein joined the new German Confederation, the loose union of German-speaking states that replaced the old Empire and lasted until 1866. Being its smallest member did not spare the principality from having to start modernising its institutions.
In 1818 it received its first constitution, a very limited one, and that same year a prince finally set foot in the territory. The deeper change came with the European revolutionary wave of 1848 and its echoes. In 1862, under Prince Johann II, who would reign for 70 years in one of the longest reigns in history, a constitution was issued that recognised civil liberties and created the Landtag, Liechtenstein's parliament, for the first time. The country was beginning to be something more than the family's property.
In 1866 the Austro-Prussian War split the German Confederation in two and ended up dissolving it. Liechtenstein, as a member, sent its modest military contingent to meet its obligations. The story told ever since, somewhere between fact and national legend, is that those eighty-odd soldiers not only suffered no casualties but came back with more men than they had set out with, because an Austrian officer (or, in other versions, an Italian friend) is said to have joined them along the way. The episode sums up the country's scale and its relationship with war perfectly.
With the Confederation gone, Liechtenstein had no military alliance and no reason to keep troops. In 1868 the prince and the Landtag made a practical decision: disband the army of barely eighty men, because it was too expensive for the principality's finances and could not defend anything anyway. Liechtenstein has had no armed forces since then and declared itself permanently neutral.
That neutrality came more from poverty and size than from any grand doctrine, but over time it became part of the country's identity and a state policy. With no army and no territorial ambitions, the country learned to survive by making itself indispensable or invisible to its neighbours, whichever suited it better. That would serve it well in the century ahead.
For more than a century Liechtenstein had been tied to Austria. Its princes lived in Vienna, its customs, postal and economic links ran through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its ruling class looked east. Liechtenstein stayed neutral in the First World War (1914-1918), but its close dependence on Austria-Hungary dragged it into economic disaster all the same when the Empire collapsed after its defeat.
The most concrete blow was monetary. When Austria-Hungary fell apart, the Austrian krone crashed, and with it went the savings of Liechtenstein's people, who used that currency. The post-war years brought hunger, inflation and a deep crisis to a country that was already poor. It was clear that staying tied to a defeated and ruined Austria had no future.
So Liechtenstein made a historic turn west, towards prosperous and neutral Switzerland. In 1919 the principality signed an agreement under which Switzerland took over the representation of its diplomatic and consular interests abroad, an arrangement that is still in place today. It was the first step in a complete realignment that, within a few years, would make Liechtenstein an economic satellite of Switzerland while keeping its full political sovereignty.
The realignment with Switzerland was sealed in the most practical areas: currency and customs. After the Austrian krone collapsed, people began using the Swiss franc in daily life, and from 1920 taxes were already paid in francs. Liechtenstein even considered issuing its own currency, but with fewer than 12,000 inhabitants it was too small to sustain one. The answer was to adopt its neighbour's. In 1924 parliament made the Swiss franc the sole official currency, with Bern's approval. Since then Liechtenstein has shared a currency with Switzerland without being part of it.
The other pillar was the customs treaty. On 29 March 1923 the two countries signed the agreement that brought the principality into Swiss customs territory, creating a common economic area that came into force on 1 January 1924. Switzerland took over the management of Liechtenstein's external borders and represented it in many trade matters. In return, the principality became part of the Swiss market and shared in Swiss stability.
Alongside this, in 1921 Liechtenstein adopted a new constitution, partly inspired by the Swiss model, that combined constitutional monarchy with parliamentary democracy and elements of direct democracy such as the referendum and the popular initiative. These three steps (the 1921 constitution, the Swiss franc and the customs union) set the institutional and economic framework Liechtenstein still lives in a century later.
In the Second World War Liechtenstein declared itself neutral again and got through the conflict without being invaded. It was largely protected by its alignment with Switzerland and by its lack of strategic importance. But the balance was fragile. There was a local Nazi party, the VDBL, funded from Germany, which in March 1939 attempted a coup to bring about the principality's annexation to the Reich. The attempt failed, and according to historians Hitler himself preferred not to strain his relations with Switzerland by forcing an annexation. The princely family, which had lived in Vienna until then, moved permanently to Vaduz in 1938, after Austria's Anschluss.
Decades later the country chose to face that period head-on. In 2001 the government set up an Independent Commission of Historians, chaired by Peter Geiger and made up of specialists from Liechtenstein, Israel, Austria and Switzerland, which presented its final report in 2005. Its conclusions were nuanced. The principality did not exploit slave labour on a mass scale or confiscate the property of Jewish families on its territory. However, its refugee policy was ambivalent and restrictive, and it granted citizenship to around 144 Jewish people in exchange for large sums of money, more a business deal than a humanitarian gesture.
The most uncomfortable findings concerned the dynasty itself. The commission documented that prisoners, including inmates of a concentration camp near Vienna, were used as forced labour on the Liechtenstein family's large agricultural estates in Austria, and that the house acquired property and works of art that had belonged to dispossessed Jews. The study concluded that Prince Franz Josef II probably had no direct knowledge of these events. The case shows the gap between the principality's small, peripheral territory and its family's vast estates in the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe.
When the war ended, Liechtenstein was still a poor farming country. On top of that, its ruling family had lost much of its wealth: Czechoslovakia and Poland expropriated the Liechtensteins' immense estates in Central Europe, more than 1,600 square kilometres of farmland and forest, many times larger than the principality itself. To raise cash, the dynasty even sold treasures from its famous art collection, such as Leonardo da Vinci's portrait 'Ginevra de' Benci', bought in 1967 by the National Gallery in Washington. It became the only Leonardo in a museum in the United States.
The transformation came along two paths. One was industry. In 1941, in the middle of the war, the brothers Martin and Eugen Hilti had founded a machine workshop in Schaan. After barely surviving the post-war years by making a bit of everything, Martin Hilti found his golden path: fastening systems and tools for the construction industry, such as nails fired into concrete. The company grew into a multinational present all over the world, known for its iconic red cases. Today it has a turnover of more than 6,000 million Swiss francs, employs tens of thousands of people and is still the country's largest employer.
The other path was finance. With very low taxes, flexible company law and strict banking secrecy, Liechtenstein became a financial centre and a haven for capital and companies from all over the world, far beyond what its size would suggest. That model sent living standards soaring until the country ranked among those with the highest income per head on the planet. It also earned it a reputation as a tax haven and brought international pressure that would explode well into the 21st century. In 1995, seeking to anchor itself in Europe without giving up its link with Switzerland, Liechtenstein joined the European Economic Area.
Liechtenstein is a political oddity in 21st-century Europe: a monarchy where the prince does not reign only symbolically but holds real power. And that power has not shrunk over time. It has grown. The man behind this was Prince Hans-Adam II, on the throne since 1989, who took on the political establishment head-on to widen the Crown's powers.
In 2003, after years of tension with the government and parliament, Hans-Adam II put to a referendum a constitutional reform that gave him very broad powers: the right to veto laws, dismiss the government, appoint judges and rule by decree in emergencies. The prince presented the vote almost as an ultimatum: if the people rejected the reform, the family would withdraw from politics and move to Vienna. On 16 March 2003, the people of Liechtenstein approved the text with 64.3% of the vote. In return, the new constitution also introduced a right never seen before: citizens could call a referendum to abolish the monarchy, and each municipality could secede from the principality.
The reform drew criticism from European bodies (the Council of Europe and the Venice Commission warned that it concentrated too much power in the monarch), but voters had backed it at the ballot box. In 2004 Hans-Adam II handed day-to-day management of state affairs to his son, Hereditary Prince Alois, while remaining head of state. In 2012 a new attempt to cut back the prince's veto power was rejected by a large majority in another referendum. With their prosperous monarchy, the people of Liechtenstein preferred to keep it just as it was.
The 21st century forced Liechtenstein to reinvent its financial model. In 2008 a leak of banking data set off an international tax-evasion scandal that mainly hit German taxpayers and put the principality in the sights of the European Union, the OECD and the United States. Under pressure, the country gradually gave up strict banking secrecy, signed tax information exchange agreements and worked to bring its financial sector up to stricter transparency standards, while remaining a wealth-management centre.
Today Liechtenstein combines traits that seem contradictory. It is one of the richest countries in the world per head and one of the smallest. It is a monarchy with real power and a democracy with strong mechanisms for direct participation. It is deeply conservative in some respects, yet it approved same-sex marriage, which came into force in 2025 after an almost unanimous vote in the Landtag in 2024. It belongs to the European Economic Area and the Schengen Area but not to the European Union. It keeps its lifeline to Switzerland (currency, customs, representation abroad) while carefully guarding an identity of its own.
In 2024 the principality took another step towards international integration by joining the International Monetary Fund. With around 40,000 inhabitants, no army, no significant public debt and a prince who still lives in the castle overlooking the capital, Liechtenstein remains what it has been since its founding in 1719: an unlikely country that turned its smallness, and its ability to adapt to the times, into the key to its survival.
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At the southern tip of Liechtenstein, on a rocky hill rising between the village of Balzers and the district of Mäls, stands Gutenberg Castle (Burg Gutenberg), built around the year 1200. Unlike Vaduz Castle, which is the prince's private residence, Gutenberg is a public castle that you can visit and that serves as a cultural venue. For centuries, from the 14th to the 19th, it belonged to the House of Habsburg, which sets it apart from the rest of the territory, tied to the House of Liechtenstein.
Gutenberg is one of the two medieval castles still standing in the country, and from its height it overlooks the southern entrance to the valley, a strategic crossing point on the routes towards Switzerland and the Grisons. Its position explains why this hill was fortified and inhabited long before the present castle existed.
The silhouette of Gutenberg above Balzers sums up the character of this region: the land of castles and the south, where the Rhine valley narrows and squeezes between mountains, and where every defensible rise was used over the centuries as a checkpoint on the area's main corridor of communication.
The Gutenberg Castle hill is one of the most important archaeological sites in Liechtenstein. Its slopes have yielded remains of settlements going back to the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, as well as Roman-era objects, proof that this promontory was an inhabited and sacred place thousands of years before the medieval fortress was built. Among the best-known finds is a bronze votive statuette of a female figure from the pre-Roman period.
The very name of Balzers gives away its age: it is first mentioned in 842 as 'Palazoles', a name of Latin origin thought to mean 'little palace' or 'little residence', suggesting that it was already a place of some importance in the early Middle Ages. It is one of the oldest recorded place names in the country.
That history-laden ground makes Balzers more than a village with a castle: it is a window onto the deepest layers of settlement in the central Alps, from the first Neolithic farmers to the Romans who controlled the Rhine valley, by way of the peoples who left their offerings on the Gutenberg hill.
Its position at the country's southern gateway put Balzers in the path of armies. During the War of the Second Coalition, in 1799, French troops camped in Balzers for about three weeks, and that same October the Russian forces of General Alexander Suvorov passed through the area as part of his famous and gruelling Alpine campaign against the French. For a country with no army and a declared policy of neutrality, these are among the few episodes in which Europe's great wars physically touched its soil.
The south of Liechtenstein was also the scene of a curious border adjustment in the 20th century. In 1949 the principality ceded to Switzerland the Ellhorn, a mountain of strategic value in the municipality of Balzers, in a territorial exchange that left some resentment among locals, who watched part of their landscape pass into their neighbour's hands.
Today Balzers is a prosperous municipality of just over 4,800 inhabitants that keeps its traditions alive, such as the festive rivalry between the districts of Balzers and Mäls or the spring bonfire of the 'Funken'. It is also home to the headquarters of Oerlikon Balzers, a coatings and vacuum technology company, another sign of how high-tech industry took root even in the villages of the principality's south.
Perched on the mountainside above the Rhine valley, the village of Triesenberg has a different origin from the rest of Liechtenstein. It was founded around 1300 by the Walser, German-speaking settlers from the Valais in Switzerland who, in the late Middle Ages, migrated across the Alps in search of high ground to clear and farm. The princes and lords of the time granted them privileges to settle difficult mountain areas that nobody else wanted to work.
The Walser specialised in life at altitude: raising livestock on mountain pastures, farming steep terraces and working a land that demanded enormous effort. Triesenberg, first recorded in 1378 as 'Trisnerberg', is the largest municipality in the country by area and takes in many hamlets scattered across the mountain, including Malbun, the principality's only ski resort.
What makes Triesenberg unique is not just its origin but the fact that this Walser identity has survived for seven centuries. In contrast to the valley, more open and cosmopolitan, Triesenberg stands for mountain Liechtenstein: that of the settlers who tamed the heights and kept, generation after generation, their own way of speaking and living.
Triesenberg's most striking feature is linguistic. While the rest of Liechtenstein speaks an Alemannic dialect shared with the Rhine valley, Triesenberg preserves its own Walser dialect, inherited directly from those settlers from the Valais and different from the speech of the neighbouring villages. It is a remarkable case of linguistic diversity within a tiny country: over just a few kilometres, the way people speak changes noticeably.
This dialect is not a curiosity of the past but a living language that the community actively cultivates and promotes as a mark of identity. The village has the Walser Museum (Walsermuseum), devoted to the history, culture, dress and language of this mountain people, which documents what life was like for the settlers and how their heritage was kept alive over the centuries.
The survival of the Walser dialect and traditions makes Triesenberg a small cultural enclave within the principality, a reminder that Liechtenstein, for all its size, is not a uniform block but the sum of communities with different origins: the valley villages, of Alemannic roots, and the Walser of the heights, who arrived from another corner of the Alps seven hundred years ago.
High in the mountains, at around 1,600 metres and less than two kilometres from the Austrian border, lies the valley of Malbun, Liechtenstein's only ski resort. Administratively it belongs to the municipality of Triesenberg, as an exclave beyond the line of peaks, and it is the principality's great mountain destination, for skiing in winter and for walking in summer.
The resort is on a scale to match the country: a handful of lifts and chairlifts climbing the slopes, runs for every level and two learning areas for the little ones, designed with families in mind. From the highest ridges you can see Switzerland and Austria at once, and the atmosphere is that of a sheltered Alpine valley, very different from the bustle of the big resorts in the Alps.
Malbun even had an unusual brush with military history: in 1968, five Swiss artillery shells, fired by mistake during manoeuvres, landed in the valley and caused some minor damage. The anecdote, almost a joke about the country's size, did not stop Malbun from becoming the heart of Liechtenstein's mountain tourism and the place where the principality, with no coastline and no big cities, shows off its Alpine nature.
Before it was a ski resort, Malbun was what all these high valleys were: a place of summer pastures where the Walser herders of Triesenberg drove their livestock in the warm months, following the traditional system of Alpine transhumance. For centuries the mountain was not a leisure destination but a hard, seasonal economic resource, tied to livestock farming and the use of common pastures.
Skiing and winter tourism reached the Alps over the course of the 20th century and completely changed what these valleys were for. Malbun gradually gained hotels, lifts and runs, and went from a herding outpost to a recreation centre. Even the princely family came here: the princes of Liechtenstein learned to ski on these slopes, which gave Malbun a certain prestige.
That shift reflects, on a small scale, the economic transformation of Europe's mountains as a whole: landscapes that for centuries barely provided a living gained new value once leisure and tourism became industries. In Liechtenstein, a country that made its fortune with industry and finance in the valley, Malbun provides the other leg of its modern economy, Alpine tourism.
On the way to Malbun, a little further down, is the small hamlet of Steg, and next to it opens the Valünatal (or Valüna valley), an Alpine valley that is quieter and less built-up than Malbun. If Malbun is the centre of downhill skiing, Steg and the Valünatal are the realm of cross-country skiing, hiking and high-mountain calm, with trails winding through meadows and forests.
The valley keeps a natural, peaceful character, with the traditional architecture of mountain huts and pastures still used for grazing in summer. It is a landscape typical of the Alpine farming system practised by the Walser: making use of every corner of the mountain according to the season, driving livestock up and down and working difficult soils.
Steg and the Valünatal represent the quietest side of Liechtenstein, far from the banks of Vaduz and the factories of Schaan. It is the natural flip side of a country known above all for its financial wealth: a place where the principality goes back to being, simply, a handful of Alpine valleys among the mountains.
Although it is known for its Rhine plain, more than half of Liechtenstein is mountainous. Most of the territory is taken up by the Rhaetian Alps, with peaks above 2,000 metres; the country's highest point is the Grauspitz, at 2,599 metres, on the border with Switzerland. It is a vertical geography of deep-cut valleys and steep slopes that for centuries shaped the lives of its inhabitants and tied them to a subsistence economy.
Historically, the mountains mattered as much as the valley. The high pastures sustained livestock farming, the basis of the diet and of the meagre export economy —cheese, butter— of the old agricultural principality. The organisation of those common pastures, the 'alps' where livestock went up in summer, shaped life in mountain villages like Triesenberg for generations.
Today those same mountains serve another purpose. With the country now wealthy thanks to industry and finance, the high mountains have become above all a space for nature and tourism, crossed by well-marked hiking routes —such as the well-known Prince's Trail, which runs along the ridges— and largely protected as nature reserves. The mountains that once barely fed people are now one of the principality's great attractions.
The area around Malbun and the Valünatal holds much of Liechtenstein's natural heritage. These are high-mountain valleys where Alpine flora and fauna thrive: chamois, marmots, birds of prey and, in the high meadows, a great variety of mountain flowers that burst into bloom in summer once the snow retreats. Part of this territory is protected as a nature reserve, a notable effort in a country so small and so densely populated along its flat strip.
The network of trails makes the region the principality's top hiking destination. From Malbun and Steg, routes climb to the passes and border summits, with views taking in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Austria in a single glance. In winter, the same slopes are covered with downhill runs in Malbun and cross-country trails in the Valünatal.
This natural side completes the portrait of the country. Liechtenstein is not just castles, banks and factories: it is also a piece of the Alps with its nature intact, a place where, a few minutes' drive from the capital and its financial towers, you can walk through high meadows in complete silence. That mix of extreme wealth and preserved mountains accounts for much of the principality's charm.
Vaduz has been the capital of Liechtenstein since 1719, when the family joined Vaduz and Schellenberg into a single principality, yet it is a small town: barely some 5,700 inhabitants, fewer than many city neighbourhoods. Above the town, perched on a steep hill at the foot of the mountain, stands Vaduz Castle (Schloss Vaduz), the residence of the reigning prince and the princely family. It is not a museum and you can't visit the inside: it is the lived-in home of the head of state, something unusual in today's Europe, and its silhouette dominates every postcard of the country.
The original core of the castle dates from the Middle Ages —some parts go back to the 12th century—, when it served as a fortress for the lords of Vaduz. Over the centuries it was extended and remodelled, and it fell into considerable disrepair until, in the 20th century, Prince Johann II and later Franz Josef II restored it thoroughly. It was Franz Josef II who, after the Anschluss of 1938, moved the family's residence permanently from Vienna to this castle, closing the long period in which the princes ruled their country from afar.
From the castle terrace you look out over the whole Rhine valley and, opposite, the Swiss mountains. That elevated position, which once had defensive value, is today the visible symbol of a monarchy that, unlike almost every other in Europe, keeps real political power over the small country spread out at its feet.
Down in the town, the most important religious building is the Cathedral of St. Florin, a neo-Gothic church built in the 19th century, in 1874, on the foundations of an earlier medieval church. It became a cathedral in 1997, when the Vatican created the Archdiocese of Liechtenstein and raised it to an episcopal see. It is dedicated to St. Florin, a saint from the Alpine region, and is the setting for the principality's major religious ceremonies.
The centre of Vaduz is a modern, tidy pedestrian street, sometimes known as the 'Städtle', where government buildings sit alongside the banks that support much of the economy and a remarkable number of museums for such a small town. The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, a black basalt cube opened in 2000, shows modern and contemporary art together with pieces from the extraordinarily rich princely collection; next door, the National Museum tells the story of the country's history and nature.
Also in the centre are the Landtag building, the parliament, opened in 2008, and the Government House. Within a few hundred metres, then, you find the whole machinery of a sovereign state: the seat of the legislature, the seat of the executive, the cathedral and the museums, with the prince's castle keeping watch from above. It is probably one of the most compact capitals in the world.
Almost all of Liechtenstein lives on the narrow flat strip of the Rhine valley, between the river and the mountains. The Rhine forms the country's entire western border with Switzerland and has been, throughout history, both a route of communication and a threat: its floods regularly swamped the lowlands and ruined the harvests of a population already living on the edge of subsistence.
Taming it took centuries. The great channelling works and drainage canals, especially in the first half of the 20th century, turned the marshy, unhealthy plain into land that could be farmed and built on, and allowed the villages and industries that now fill the valley to grow. Much of the country's modern prosperity began, quite literally, by winning ground back from the river.
Across this plain, almost touching one another, lie the country's main municipalities —Vaduz, Schaan, Triesen, Eschen—, linked by a road network and by the railway line between Switzerland and Austria. The valley is Liechtenstein's backbone: it holds the population, the capital, the factories and the banks, while the mountains to the east are left to high-altitude farming and tourism.
North of Vaduz, with hardly a break between them, lies Schaan, Liechtenstein's most populous municipality, with just over 6,000 inhabitants. Although today it is mainly an industrial and transport hub, Schaan holds the oldest traces of organised settlement in the country: the area has been inhabited for thousands of years, and under the Roman Empire, when this region was part of the province of Raetia, a military fort (castrum) was built here to defend the valley from Alemannic raids.
That period and later ones have yielded remarkable finds. In 1887, during excavation work above the place called Dux, two Roman legionary helmets were found buried; they are now kept in museums in Bregenz and Zurich. Schaan's Church of St. Peter preserves a 5th-century baptistery, evidence of a very early Christianisation of the Rhine valley, when Christianity was only just taking hold in the Alps.
Schaan tells Liechtenstein's deep history: that of an Alpine crossroads that was Roman before it was Germanic, and Christian since late Antiquity. On top of those age-old layers came the 20th-century transformation that would turn this farming village into the economic engine of the principality.
What made Schaan famous around the world was not its Roman past but a company. In 1941, in the middle of the Second World War, the brothers Martin and Eugen Hilti founded a mechanical workshop here, 'Maschinenbau Hilti'. After getting through the post-war years making everything from lighters to kitchen mixers, the company found its calling in tools and fastening systems for construction, and from this Rhine valley village it set out to conquer the world.
Today Hilti is a multinational present in more than a hundred countries, recognisable by its tools and distinctive red cases, with revenue of over 6,000 million Swiss francs and tens of thousands of employees. It still has its headquarters in Schaan and is, by a huge margin, Liechtenstein's largest employer: much of the country's industrial prosperity starts here.
Schaan is also home to the country's main railway station and a transport hub linking Switzerland with Austria. It is Liechtenstein's productive side: while Vaduz brings the castle, the museums and the politics, Schaan brings the factories, the jobs and the exports that explain why this Alpine microstate ranks among the richest on the planet.
Hardly anything that happened to Liechtenstein happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
