🇨🇭 Switzerland · North and the cities
Zurich has a reputation as a city of bankers, expensive and serious, but anyone who visits discovers something quite different: a vibrant, young city with a quality of life that puts it year after year among the best in the world to live in. It is true that the financial heart of Switzerland beats here, with the famous Bahnhofstrasse and its banks, but it is also a city that swims in its lake and its river, that has one of the most intense cultural and nightlife scenes in the country, and that keeps a charming medieval old town on the banks of the Limmat.
The city spreads along both sides of the river, which flows out of Lake Zurich and runs through it. On the eastern bank stands the Grossmünster, the imposing twin-towered church linked to Huldrych Zwingli and the Protestant Reformation; opposite, the Fraumünster holds the famous stained glass windows by Marc Chagall. Among medieval lanes, squares, historic guild houses and the lively Niederdorf area, Zurich invites you to walk without rushing. And to the south, the lake opens a horizon of mountains that on clear days lets you see the Alps.
This guide covers Zurich with a practical, warm eye: what to see in the old town, how to make the most of the lake and the river, where the art hides (from the Kunsthaus to the Dadaism born at the Cabaret Voltaire), how to get around on its exemplary public transport and how to use the city as a base for much of Switzerland. Zurich is the perfect gateway to a country that makes an art of beauty and efficiency.
Zurich's history begins long before Switzerland. Remains of prehistoric pile-dwelling settlements have been found on the lakeshore (today a UNESCO World Heritage Site). In Roman times there was a customs station here called Turicum, the origin of the present name. In the Middle Ages, Zurich grew as a free city of the Holy Roman Empire and grew rich on trade and the guilds; in 1351 it joined the Swiss Confederation, the alliance of cantons that would give rise to Switzerland. Its most decisive historical moment came in the 16th century, when the reformer Huldrych Zwingli, preacher at the Grossmünster, made Zurich one of the great centres of the Protestant Reformation, transforming the religious, social and economic life of the city. In the following centuries, Zurich established itself as an intellectual centre and, above all, as an industrial and financial power: in the 19th century it became the economic engine of the new federal Switzerland, with the arrival of the railway, the founding of the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and the rise of banking. In the 20th century the city was a refuge for artists and intellectuals — in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire, the Dada movement was born — and it kept growing as a global financial capital. Today Zurich combines that economic weight with a very high quality of life and a powerful cultural scene. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of German Switzerland and its urban plateau: Zurich, Zwingli's city turned financial capital; Bern, the Zähringen city-state that is today the federal capital; Basel, cradle of humanism and of Erasmus on the Rhine; and Lucerne, the first city to join the Pact.
Read the history of North and the cities →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Zurich was a city, its shores were already inhabited. At the end of Lake Zurich and along the river Limmat, archaeologists have found remains of Bronze Age and Neolithic pile-dwelling settlements: communities that built their houses on stilts driven into shallow water, a way of life that left traces across the whole Alpine arc. Those prehistoric lake settlements in the Alps — of which Zurich has examples — were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, and they remind us that the city's relationship with its lake goes back thousands of years.
The name 'Zurich' was born in Roman times. Under the emperor Augustus, the Romans set up on a small hill beside the Limmat — today's Lindenhof — a customs station to tax the goods moving along the river network and the alpine roads. The post was called 'Turicum', the name from which, over the centuries, the German Zürich and the Spanish Zúrich derive. A Roman tombstone found in the city, with an inscription mentioning the Turicum customs station, is the oldest proof of that name.
During the Empire, Turicum was a modest but strategic point on the frontier of the Roman provinces, on the route linking Italy with northern Europe over the alpine passes. With the decline of Rome and the invasions of the Germanic peoples — especially the Alemanni — the region became part of the early medieval Germanic world, and that small customs post was the seed of the future city.
In the Middle Ages, Zurich grew around two great religious institutions that still shape its skyline. On the right bank of the Limmat rose the Grossmünster, the twin-towered 'great minster' that, according to legend, was founded by Charlemagne over the tombs of the city's patron saints, Felix and Regula. On the left bank, the Fraumünster was the church of a powerful women's abbey, founded in the 9th century by King Louis the German for his daughter. The abbesses of the Fraumünster came to hold enormous power, with the right to mint coins and to exercise lordship over the city.
In 1218, Zurich became a free imperial city, answering directly to the Holy Roman Emperor rather than to a local feudal lord, which gave it a wide degree of autonomy. The great political turning point came in 1336, when the knight Rudolf Brun led a revolution that handed power to the guilds of craftspeople and merchants. The new guild constitution (Zunftverfassung) organised the government of the city around the trade corporations, a system that would last for centuries and whose legacy is still celebrated today in the Sechseläuten festival, with its guild fraternities parading in historic costume.
In 1351, Zurich took a decisive step for its future: it joined the Swiss Confederation, the alliance of cantons born in 1291 around the forests of Lake Lucerne. The city became one of the most important members of that confederation, contributing its economic and military weight, though not without tensions and wars with its own confederate neighbours.
Zurich holds a central place in the religious history of Europe, because it was one of the cradles of the Protestant Reformation. In 1519, the priest and humanist Huldrych Zwingli was appointed preacher at the Grossmünster and began preaching against practices he considered corrupt or without foundation in the Bible: the sale of indulgences, the cult of images, compulsory clerical celibacy and the power of Rome. Inspired by the humanism of Erasmus and, in part, in parallel with Luther in Germany, Zwingli drove a thorough reform of the Church in the city.
The Zurich Reformation was especially austere and radical in visual terms: images, altars and organs were removed from the churches, and religious life centred on preaching and the reading of the Bible. The city council officially adopted the new ideas, so that Church and government became closely bound together. Zurich thus became a centre spreading Reformed Protestantism, distinct from Lutheranism and a forerunner of the Calvinism that would later flourish in Geneva.
The Reformation split the Swiss Confederation between Protestant and Catholic cantons, and that fracture led to wars of religion. Zwingli died in 1531 at the battle of Kappel, fighting against the Catholic cantons, where he had gone as chaplain to the Zurich troops. Despite his death, the Reformation was firmly rooted in Zurich, and the city would keep for centuries a Protestant, hard-working and sober identity that many still associate with its character.
After the wars of religion, Zurich enjoyed centuries of prosperity as an urban republic governed by its guilds and by an elite of families. In the 17th and 18th centuries it established itself as an important centre of the textile industry — silk and cotton — which employed much of the population of the city and the surrounding countryside. Wealth and a Protestant, enlightened atmosphere made Zurich a notable cultural centre: thinkers such as Johann Jakob Bodmer worked here and, later, the city would be a refuge and home for intellectuals from all over Europe.
The creation of modern Switzerland in 1848, as a federal state, found Zurich in the middle of a transformation. In 1855 the Federal Polytechnic (today's ETH Zürich) was founded, destined to become one of the best technical universities in the world and where, decades later, people such as Albert Einstein would study and teach. The arrival of the railway and industrialisation sent growth soaring: Zurich filled with factories, banks and insurance companies, and its population multiplied as it absorbed neighbouring municipalities.
Through the 20th century, Zurich cemented its position as Switzerland's great economic engine and as one of the most important financial centres on the planet. The famous Bahnhofstrasse, the avenue linking the main station with the lake, became a symbol of that wealth, with its banks and luxury shops. Swiss stability, banking secrecy and the solidity of its institutions drew capital from all over the world, and the city came to top international quality-of-life rankings again and again.
Swiss neutrality made Zurich, during the 20th century, a refuge for the persecuted, for revolutionaries and for artists from all over Europe, above all in wartime. During the First World War, while the continent bled in the trenches, the neutral city took in a crowd of exiles. Among them was Vladimir Lenin, who lived for a time in Zurich before leaving for Russia in 1917 to lead the Bolshevik revolution; the house where he stayed can still be seen, in the old town.
In that same atmosphere, in 1916, a group of refugee artists and writers founded the Dada movement at the Cabaret Voltaire, in the Niederdorf district: a provocative, anti-war avant-garde that answered the rational horror of the war with the absurd and the nonsensical. Figures such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp put Zurich on the map of world avant-garde art. The Cabaret Voltaire still operates today as a cultural space and a place of memory for that creative explosion.
The city was also home to great writers: the Irishman James Joyce lived and died in Zurich (he is buried in the Fluntern cemetery) and worked there on part of his output. And it was a cradle of Jungian psychoanalysis: Carl Gustav Jung developed much of his thinking in the region. That mix of prosperity, tolerance and intellectual refuge made Zurich, despite its reputation as a sober banking city, a surprising cultural laboratory through the 20th century.
Today's Zurich is a relatively small city in population — a little over 400.000 in the municipality, around a million and a half in its metropolitan area — but with enormous economic and cultural weight. It is consistently one of the highest-rated cities in the world for quality of life, thanks to its safety, its cleanliness, its supremely efficient public transport (trams, trains and boats perfectly synchronised) and its natural setting: the lake, the rivers and the mountains a step away.
In recent decades, Zurich has reinvented itself beyond its image as a banking centre. Former industrial areas such as Zürich-West, around the old Escher Wyss factory, have been transformed into fashionable districts, full of bars, galleries, restaurants, design spaces and contemporary architecture, such as the Prime Tower skyscraper or the Schiffbau hall. The city thus combines the tradition of its medieval old town — the Lindenhof, the Grossmünster, the Fraumünster with its Chagall windows, the lanes of the Niederdorf — with a nightlife and cultural scene very intense for its size.
Zurich also lives facing its lake. In summer, the 'Badis' (public baths on the shores of the lake and the rivers) fill with people, and swimming in clean water in the middle of the city is one of the great local pleasures. Events such as the Street Parade (one of the largest electronic music festivals in the world) or the traditional Sechseläuten, with the burning of the 'Böögg' (a snowman figure whose head explodes to announce the end of winter), show the two faces of a city that manages to be at once deeply traditional and surprisingly modern.