Things to do
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Baur au Lac
A hotel of 1844 in its own park where the lake meets the canal, run by the same family for six generations and the address the city's banking clients have used since there was banking here. Wagner gave a first reading of the Ring in it.
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Lake Zurich
A lake of forty kilometres running south-east from the city, with public lidos on both banks inside the city limits and boats to Rapperswil. Swimming in it from the Seebad is an ordinary summer evening here.
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Swiss National Museum
A turreted building of 1898 behind the station, made to look like a castle, holding the country's own history from the stone age forward. It is the clearest single account of how a federation of very different cantons happened.
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Uetliberg
The wooded hill on the city's western edge at 869 metres, reached by train in twenty minutes from the main station, looking down the whole lake to the Alps. The ridge walk south to Felsenegg takes about two hours.
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Fraumuenster
A church on the left bank founded as an abbey in 853, holding five stained glass windows made by Marc Chagall in 1970 when he was in his eighties, and a rose window by Giacometti in the north transept.
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Grossmuenster
The twin-towered Romanesque church on the right bank where Huldrych Zwingli began the Swiss Reformation in 1519, which is why the interior is bare. The south tower is climbed by 187 steps and the windows are by Sigmar Polke.
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Kunsthaus Zurich
The largest art collection in the country, with the biggest holding of Munch outside Norway, a room of Giacometti and a Chipperfield extension of 2021 that doubled the space and brought its own argument about provenance with it.
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Museum Rietberg
The only museum of non-European art in Switzerland, in three villas in a park south of the centre with an entrance hall sunk into the ground under a green glass canopy. Its Indian and West African holdings are the strongest parts.