Where to Stay in Zürich, Kanton Zürich

What is Zürich known for?

Zürich is the largest city in Switzerland and an international financial centre, and the museums are where a good deal of that money ended up. The Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Rietberg and the Swiss National Museum anchor the rest. St. Peter and the Wasserkirche are older than all of them.

Lake Zurich starts at the city and runs south-east toward the Swiss Alps, whose ski resorts pull a great deal of traffic straight through Zürich without stopping.

What are the main landmarks in Zürich?

Zürich keeps its landmarks in ones and twos rather than in one set piece. St. Peter and the Wasserkirche are the old church pair, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Kunsthalle Zürich are the two art houses, and the Swiss National Museum holds the country's own record. The Zürich Zoo sits apart from those.

Museum Rietberg, the Museum of Design, the FIFA Museum and the Pavillon Le Corbusier scatter the rest across the city, and the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich takes a corner of it.

What is the history of Zürich?

Zürich begins as Turicum, a Roman settlement dated to about 200, and that name has outlasted every language spoken here since. Rome withdrew. What replaced it was written in stone rather than on paper, in the church towers a medieval town raised and rebuilt: St. Peter above the lanes, and the Wasserkirche out on its own toward the water.

Each one marks a parish with money behind it. The modern city is the same instinct in another form, because a place that grew into an international financial centre put its surplus into institutions rather than into palaces. Books and manuscripts went into the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

The Swiss National Museum, built to hold the country's own record, gave the Confederation one roof for its past, while the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunsthalle Zürich and the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection turned private fortunes into public walls. Then the twentieth century laid down a thinner layer on top of that one. The Pavillon Le Corbusier arrived under an architect's name, the Swiss Film Archive began keeping what the country had shot, and the Zürich James Joyce Foundation put a writer's name on a Zürich address.

Turicum is still down there, and the modern name grew out of it.

Where is Zürich?

Zürich stands at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich, in north-central Switzerland. The lake does the orienting. The water runs south-east out of the city, and the districts on either side of it, Kreis 2 to the west and Kreis 8 to the east, follow it out of town.

Kanton Zürich takes its name from the city and surrounds it. The Swiss Alps rise further south, close enough that their ski resorts count as part of what Zürich offers and far enough that the city itself sits on open ground.

What is the climate of Zürich?

Zürich lies in the temperate band, and Lake Zurich takes the edge off both ends of the year. Warmth arrives without ferocity. Winter is properly cold, but the deep snow belongs to the Swiss Alps rather than to the lake shore, which is why the ski resorts near the city are a journey out and not a view from the window.

Enge and the other lakeside quarters stay walkable through most of it.

How do you get to Zürich?

Zürich is where the Swiss network folds together. Railways, roads and air traffic all run through the city, and Zurich Airport carries most of what arrives from outside the country. The main railway station handles the rest.

Trains leave it for the whole of Switzerland and for the cities past the border, and the trams cover the ground inside the city that the trains do not. The Zurich Tram Museum keeps the cars that used to.