Zurich: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
On the first day of 1519 a priest called Huldrych Zwingli climbed into the pulpit of the Grossmünster and, instead of reading the assigned passage, began at the first line of the Gospel of Matthew and worked forward. Within six years Zurich had stripped the images out of every church, sold the silver, closed the monasteries and silenced the organs — the city went without church music for eighty years. This walk is what a city looks like after it has decided to own nothing beautiful. Two hours, flat, and all of it in the old town.
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A short history of Zurich
The Romans set up a customs post here called Turicum, at the end of the lake on the River Limmat. In 1351 Zurich joined the Swiss Confederation, and in 1519 Ulrich Zwingli began preaching at the Grossmünster church, from where the Reformation spread through Switzerland. In the 19th century the city grew as a centre of industry and banking, and in 1855 the Federal Institute of Technology was founded here, where Albert Einstein studied. In 1916 the Dada movement was born at the Cabaret Voltaire in the old town. Today it is the largest city in Switzerland, with about 420,000 inhabitants.
The ten best sights in Zurich
1Grossmünster€5 for the tower, and the Reformation started in this pulpit
2Fraumünster€5, and the five Chagall windows are why you go
3St. PeterFree, and the clock face is the largest in Europe
4WasserkircheFree, built on the island where two saints were beheaded
5Kunsthaus€24, and the largest Giacometti collection anywhere
6Landesmuseum€13, and it explains how a country of four languages holds
7Rietberg Museum€18, non-European art in a villa Wagner once rented
8Museum für Gestaltung€12, and Swiss graphic design was invented in this city
9Cabaret Voltaire€12, and Dada was invented in this one room in 1916
10FIFA Museum€26, and FIFA is registered here as a Swiss association
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Zurich →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Zurich:
Free walking tours in Zurich
What Zwingli took off the walls
On the first day of 1519 a priest called Huldrych Zwingli climbed into the pulpit of the Grossmünster and, instead of reading the assigned passage, began at the first line of the Gospel of Matthew and worked forward. Within six years Zurich had stripped the images out of every church, sold the silver, closed the monasteries and silenced the organs — the city went without church music for eighty years. This walk is what a city looks like after it has decided to own nothing beautiful. Two hours, flat, and all of it in the old town.
- Grossmünster · The twin towers are the emblem of Zurich, and the inside is almost empty — whitewashed walls, plain glass, no altar painting. That is not neglect but the point: Zwingli had everything removed in 1524, and the city never put it back.
- Wasserkirche · Built on the islet where Felix and Regula, the city’s patron saints, were beheaded and then — the legend insists — picked up their own heads and walked forty paces uphill. The Reformation turned the church into a warehouse; it is a church again, and the stone they died on is in the crypt.
- Fraumünster · An abbey of noblewomen that once ruled the city outright — its abbess minted the coins and appointed the mayor — until the last of them handed everything to the city in 1524 and married Zwingli’s deputy. Four and a half centuries later Marc Chagall glazed five windows here, at eighty-three.
- St. Peter · The clock face is 8.64 metres across, the largest church clock face in Europe, and it was built that size so the boatmen on the lake could read the hour. A watchman lived in the tower until 1911 and rang the bell for fire.
- Lindenhof · A Roman customs post stood on this rock, then an imperial palace, and in 1292 the men of Zurich were away at war when Habsburg troops came. The women put on armour and lined the hill; the enemy counted the helmets, assumed the army had returned, and left.
- Rathaus · Built in 1698 standing out in the river on piles, so that it belonged to no guild’s quarter and no faction could claim it stood on their ground. The cantonal parliament still sits in it, and the river runs underneath.
Three refugees on one street
Switzerland was neutral in the First World War, and so everyone who could not be anywhere else came here. In 1916 a German draft-dodger opened a nightclub at Spiegelgasse 1 and invented Dada in it; at number 14, fourteen doors up the same lane, lived a Russian exile named Lenin, who left in a sealed train in April 1917 and changed the century; and down by the lake an Irishman with failing eyes was writing Ulysses. None of the three ever mentioned meeting the others. Two hours, and the lane climbs.
- Cabaret Voltaire · Hugo Ball opened it in February 1916 in the back room of a bar and it lasted five months. In those five months a group of exiles read nonsense poems in three languages at once, wore cardboard costumes, and named the whole thing Dada — a word they said they found at random in a dictionary.
- Niederdorf · Spiegelgasse runs up out of these lanes, and Lenin lived at number 14 in one room with his wife above a sausage maker, paying twenty-eight francs a month. He read in the city library every day and complained that Switzerland was too comfortable to have a revolution.
- Schauspielhaus · Through the 1930s and the war this was the only German-language theatre in Europe free to say anything, and it filled with actors and directors Germany had expelled. Brecht premiered Mother Courage here in 1941, to an audience that included German officers on leave.
- Kunsthaus · The largest Giacometti holding anywhere — the thin walking figures, pared down until almost nothing is left, which he said was an attempt to sculpt how a person looks from a distance. The 2021 extension holds a collection whose wartime provenance Zurich is still arguing about in public.
- Fluntern Cemetery · James Joyce fled Trieste for Zurich twice, wrote most of Ulysses here, and died here in 1941 after surgery. He is buried sitting, in bronze, with a book, facing the zoo — his wife said he would have liked hearing the lions.
- Platzspitz · A park on the spit where the two rivers meet, and between 1987 and 1992 it was an open drug market that the police were told to leave alone — "Needle Park", known across Europe. The experiment was closed, the policy replaced with prescribed heroin, and the city does not put it on signs.
The money and the water
Zurich holds one of the world’s great concentrations of private money, and it also has a lake its citizens swim in on a Tuesday lunchtime. The two sit two hundred metres apart. This walk goes down the most expensive shopping street in Europe, past the square with the gold under it, and ends in the water — because the thing that actually surprises a visitor here is that a banking capital swims. Two hours, and bring a swimsuit from May.
- Bahnhofstrasse · The street was a moat until 1864, when the city filled it in and sold the frontage. It is regularly ranked among the three most expensive retail streets on earth, and the trams running down the middle of it are the reason it never became a car street.
- Augustinergasse · One lane west of all that money, and the painted bay windows on it are from the seventeenth century — a tax dodge, since a window that overhung the street was not counted in the floor area. It was the shoemakers’ lane.
- Rietberg Museum · Switzerland’s only museum of non-European art, in a villa where Richard Wagner lived for a year while he was exiled from Germany for taking part in an uprising. He wrote part of the Ring cycle in it, and it is a park now, free to walk through.
- Seebad Enge · A wooden deck built out into the lake where office workers swim in their lunch hour and nobody finds it strange. In winter the same deck runs a sauna and people go from the heat straight into four-degree water.
- Frauenbad · A wooden river bath from 1888 that is still women only during the day, exactly as it was built — the city has kept the rule for a hundred and thirty-five years. After seven in the evening it becomes a bar open to everyone.
- Oberer Letten · Four hundred metres of canal where you climb in at the top and let the Limmat carry you down, then walk back and do it again. The water is clean enough to drink, and it is free — the city tests it daily and publishes the result.
Getting to Zurich and getting around
- Zurich Airport · The train to the centre is 10 minutes and runs every few minutes
- Hauptbahnhof · Nearly 3,000 trains a day, and the old hall is a market in December
- Sihlquai · The long-distance coaches leave from behind the station
- Bürkliplatz · Trams meet here, and the lake boats leave from the quay
Cheap eats in Zurich
Eight counters where Zurich eats standing. This is one of the most expensive cities on earth and a sit-down dinner is sixty francs, so these are the places where lunch is fifteen: a sausage grill that has had a queue since 1963, a vegetarian house that opened in 1898 and is the oldest in the world, and a market hall under a railway bridge.
- Sternen Grill · About CHF 9, standing, and open until midnight
- Hiltl · The buffet is by weight, about CHF 5 per 100g
- Markthalle Im Viadukt · Under a working railway bridge, and lunch under CHF 20
- Sprüngli · About CHF 1.30 each, and the counter is downstairs
- Zeughauskeller · A 1487 armoury, long tables, and you share them
- Café Schober · The hot chocolate, in a room that looks like a theatre
- Helvetiaplatz market · Tuesdays and Fridays, and it is where the city shops
- Frau Gerolds Garten · Containers and long tables, and summer only
Museums in Zurich
- Kunsthaus · CHF 24, closed Mondays, and free on Wednesdays
- Landesmuseum · CHF 13, and the children’s floor is the good one
- Museum für Gestaltung · CHF 12, and the poster archive needs booking
- Cabaret Voltaire · CHF 12, one room, and Dada started in it in 1916
- Rietberg Museum · CHF 18, in Wagner’s villa, and the park is free
- Kunsthalle Zürich · CHF 12, a shipyard hall, and nothing in it is old
- FIFA Museum · CHF 26, and every World Cup shirt ever worn
Nature and day trips near Zurich
Zurich swims in its own river and its own lake, in the middle of the city, and the water is tested every day and published. That is the thing to do here, and most of it costs nothing.
- Lake Zurich · Free to swim, and the boats from Bürkliplatz
- Uetliberg · 25 minutes from the main station, and the ticket is CHF 9
- Oberer Letten · Free, and you float 400 metres down the river
- Frauenbad · Women only by day since 1888, and a bar after seven
- Seebad Enge · CHF 9, a deck in the lake, and a sauna in winter
- Rieterpark · Free, the largest park in the city, and old trees
- Zürichhorn · Free, a lakeside walk, and a Chinese garden on it
- Rhine Falls · 50 minutes by train, free to look, CHF 20 for the boat
Things to do in Zurich with kids
- Zurich Zoo · CHF 29, children CHF 14, and tram 6 goes to the door
- Technorama · CHF 35, 25 minutes by train, and a full day
- Lindt Home of Chocolate · CHF 15, a nine-metre chocolate fountain, and free samples
- Uetliberg · A rack railway up, a tower to climb, and a long slide down
- Chinagarten · CHF 4, koi carp, and open only in the summer months
- Landesmuseum · A castle with a drawbridge, and children under 16 free
Live music in Zurich
- Opera House · From CHF 20 standing, and the dress code is relaxed
- Schauspielhaus · The theatre that took in everyone Germany expelled
- Moods · Tickets from CHF 25, and it starts at half past eight
- Rote Fabrik · A factory on the lake the city fought to keep as a venue
- El Lokal · A small room by the river, and the acts are close enough to touch
- Mascotte · By Bellevue, and the Tuesday karaoke is a city institution
Nightlife in Zurich
Zurich has more clubs per head than Berlin, which nobody expects, and the reason is the Street Parade: a techno demonstration that began in 1992 as a protest for freedom and now brings close to a million people to the lakefront every August.
- Zurich West · Where the factories were, and where the clubs are now
- Langstrasse · Open late every night, and busiest on a Thursday
- Hive · Techno until the morning, and the queue starts at one
- Zukunft · A basement off Langstrasse, and no photographs inside
- Frau Gerolds Garten · Where the evening starts in summer, under the railway
- Niederdorf · The old-town lanes, and the bars are older than the clubs
Frequently asked questions about Zurich
What is there to see in Zurich?
The top sights in Zurich are Grossmünster, Fraumünster and St. Peter. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Zurich?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Zurich without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Zurich?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Zurich, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: What Zwingli took off the walls.
How do you get to Zurich and get around?
The main ways are Zurich Airport, Hauptbahnhof and Sihlquai. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Zurich, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Zurich that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Zurich for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.