58 Fun Facts About Zurich

Which river flows out of Lake Zurich through the city centre?

Limmat is a second name for one river: the Linth pours into the far end of Lake Zurich and leaves through the city under its new name. Downstream it joins the Aare, which carries it on to the Rhine.

In 1848 Zurich lost a parliamentary vote to become the seat of Switzerland's new federal government; which city won?

Bern won the vote of 28 November 1848, ahead of Zurich and Lucerne; deputies seem to have been wary of making the country's strongest centre stronger still. Its official title is 'federal city' rather than capital.

What did the Romans call Zurich?

Turicum is first recorded on a gravestone of about AD 200 that names the customs station there. The Romans ran it to tax goods crossing between Gaul and Raetia, the Alpine province next door.

On which small hill in Zurich's old town, now a quiet lookout, did the Romans build their fort?

Lindenhof's fourth-century fort later gave way to a Carolingian royal palace, and Zurichers went on gathering on the hill for centuries. Today the terrace is a peaceful square where chess players meet.

Which Carolingian king founded Zurich's Fraumünster abbey in 853 for his daughter?

Louis the German handed the convent to his daughter Hildegard. Around 1045 it gained the rights to mint coins, levy tolls and hold markets, and its abbess became mistress of the city, appointing its chief magistrate.

Zurich joined the Swiss Confederacy as its fifth member to gain allies against which ruling house?

Habsburg was the threat: exiles based in Habsburg-held Rapperswil tried to topple Zurich's guild government in 1350, so the city allied with the forest cantons in May 1351, and a Habsburg duke besieged it within months.

Who launched the Swiss Reformation as chief preacher at the Grossmünster in 1519?

Huldrych Zwingli's first public clash came in Lent 1522, when Zurich citizens pointedly ate sausages; he had not joined in, but he defended the fast-breakers in a sermon that became his first Reformation tract.

Where did the leader of Zurich's Reformation die in 1531?

On the battlefield at Kappel, where he fell among Zurich's troops; the Catholic cantons had declared war after Zurich and an ally cut off their supplies of grain and salt.

In legend, whose horse knelt over the graves of Zurich's patron saints, prompting him to found the Grossmünster?

Charlemagne's horse, the legend says, knelt where Felix and Regula lay; the beheaded martyrs were said to have picked up their own heads and carried them forty paces uphill to choose their grave.

Which artist designed the five stained-glass windows in the Fraumünster choir, installed in 1970?

Marc Chagall was 83 when the choir windows went in, each glowing in one dominant colour, and he returned at about 90 to add a rose window in the transept.

Which Zurich street replaced a moat called the Frogs' Ditch?

Bahnhofstrasse replaced the Fröschengraben, the ditch in front of the old city walls, which was filled in so a broad boulevard could link the railway station with the lake.

Which Zurich square, once a pig market, is now a byword for Swiss banking?

Paradeplatz was the Säumärt, a 17th-century livestock market, then Neumarkt, and took its present name in the 1860s; the big Swiss banks later built their head offices around it.

Which mountain of about 870 metres, reached by its own railway line, is known as Zurich's Hausberg?

Uetliberg draws crowds in winter because its summit often sits above the fog that blankets the city, with a clear view of the Alps.

Kreis 1, the first of Zurich's twelve numbered districts, goes by which name?

Altstadt, the old town, was the whole of Zurich until 1893, when the city merged with its ring of suburbs, became Switzerland's largest and needed numbered districts.

What is the traditional spring holiday at which Zurich's guilds parade and burn a snowman?

Sechseläuten means the six o'clock ringing of the bells: from spring a bell at six marked the end of the working day, and the guilds made a festival of the change.

What is the snowman effigy burned at Zurich's spring guild festival called?

Böögg burning began apart from the guilds: people of Zurich's old Kratz quarter burned such figures each spring, and only in the 1890s did the guilds adopt the custom and turn the doll into a snowman standing for winter.

Which art movement was founded at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916?

Dada was a protest against the First World War: artists who had fled to neutral Zurich answered the slaughter with nonsense, wordless sound poems and irony.

Which revolutionary lived at Spiegelgasse 14, a few doors from Cabaret Voltaire, from 1916?

Vladimir Lenin spent his Zurich year in the city's libraries, finishing his book on imperialism, and left in April 1917 on a train across wartime Germany after revolution toppled the tsar.

Which couple opened Cabaret Voltaire in the back room of a Zurich tavern in February 1916?

Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, a German poet and a cabaret singer, opened it as an artists' pub; on its stage he recited his 'verses without words', poems built purely from invented sounds.

Which physicist failed Zurich's polytechnic entrance exam at 16?

Albert Einstein shone in maths and physics but fell short in the general subjects, so he spent a year at a school in Aarau before getting in; he came back in 1912 as a professor.

Which Zurich institution did the Swiss federal government found in 1854?

ETH Zurich was the compromise: liberals wanted a federal university, conservatives wanted higher education left to the cantons, so parliament settled on a federal polytechnic, which opened in 1855.

Which European first does the University of Zurich claim?

Earliest created by a state, not a monarch or church: in 1833 the canton of Zurich merged its old colleges of theology, law and medicine and added an arts faculty, so a republic stood behind the new university.

Which world sports body is headquartered in Zurich?

FIFA's home on the Zürichberg hides about two-thirds of itself underground, including the chamber where its leaders meet and a meditation room.

Which football club, founded in 1886, holds the record of 27 Swiss league titles?

Grasshoppers were founded by an English student, Tom E. Griffith, as Zurich's first football club; the record champions later sank far enough to be relegated in 2019, their first drop in about seven decades.

What is the Weltklasse Zürich athletics meeting nicknamed?

The one-day Olympics made history in 1960: Armin Hary ran the first 10.0-second 100 metres, saw it struck out as a false start, demanded a re-run and ran 10.0 again 35 minutes later.

Zurich's Street Parade techno festival officially remains what?

A demonstration is how it won its first permit in 1992, as a 'Demonstration for Love, Peace, Liberty, Generosity and Tolerance' with about a thousand dancers, and its organisers have kept that status ever since.

St. Peter, the oldest parish church in Zurich, holds which European record?

Largest church clock face: each dial is about 8.7 metres across. The tower belongs to the city rather than the parish, because Zurich's fire watchman kept lookout from it from 1340 until 1911.

The chocolatier Lindt & Sprüngli is based in which lakeside town just south of Zurich?

Kilchberg got the chocolate works in 1899, when the Sprüngli firm finished a bigger factory there and, that same year, bought Rodolphe Lindt's business along with the secret recipe for his smooth-melting chocolate.

Which group branded Swiss bankers the 'gnomes of Zurich' during Britain's sterling crisis of 1964?

Labour politicians, facing a run on the pound, blamed Swiss speculators: George Brown reportedly said the gnomes of Zurich were at work again, and Harold Wilson vowed to resist them.

Which Irish novelist worked on Ulysses in Zurich during World War I and is buried at Fluntern?

He died in the city in 1941.

Railway pioneer Alfred Escher, whose statue stands outside Zurich's main station, founded which bank in 1856 to finance his lines?

Credit Suisse began as the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt: Escher disliked seeing Swiss railways depend on foreign lenders, so he set up a home-grown bank to fund them. UBS took it over in 2023.

Zurich Airport was built on the moorland of an army training ground in which town?

Kloten took over Zurich's airline traffic in 1948 from Dübendorf, the military airfield that had doubled as the city's civil one; the army gave up a marshy artillery range so the new airport could be built.

Which traditional Zurich dish is sliced veal in a cream sauce?

Zürcher Geschnetzeltes is typically served with rösti, and kitchens split on one ingredient: some add sliced veal kidneys to the veal, others leave them out.

Which American-born rock star settled beside Lake Zurich in the 1990s and gave up her US passport to become Swiss in 2013?

Tina Turner moved to the lake shore with her German partner, a record executive, married him there in 2013, the year she became Swiss, and died at her home there in 2023.

Which everyday greeting meaning 'good day' is typical of Zurich's Swiss German dialect?

Grüezi is a worn-down blessing: dictionaries trace it to a phrase meaning 'may God greet you', and in Zurich it sits beside the more casual Hoi and Salü.

Which Brecht play had its world premiere at Zurich's Schauspielhaus in 1941?

Mother Courage opened in Zurich because Brecht was shut out of German theatres: the Schauspielhaus, staffed by refugee actors, was a leading German-language stage beyond Nazi control, and it premiered two more of his plays by 1943.

Which composer fled to Zurich after the failed Dresden uprising of 1849 and lived there in exile for most of the 1850s?

Richard Wagner began Tristan and Isolde in Zurich while in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, his patron's wife; when his own wife found his letters, the uproar drove him from the city.

Zurich Zoo's Masoala Hall recreates a rainforest from which island?

Madagascar's Masoala peninsula is the model: the hall, opened in 2003, houses red ruffed lemurs native to that peninsula, and the zoo built it to win visitors over to protecting the real forest.

Which target-shooting competition for Zurich teenagers admitted girls only from 1991?

Knabenschiessen means 'boys' shooting' and grew out of marksmanship training for boys, first recorded in 1656; girls were let in to mark Switzerland's 700th anniversary.

Zurich has been Switzerland's largest city since 1893; which city, with fewer than half as many residents, ranks second?

Geneva has only about 200,000 residents. Zurich pulled clear by absorbing its overstretched suburbs, a first ring in 1893, after a petition from working-class Aussersihl, and eight more in 1934.

Which US tech company opened a Zurich office in 2004 that grew into its biggest engineering centre in Europe?

Google moved its Zurich engineers into the old Hürlimann brewery, and its workforce in the city has since grown to several thousand.

Zurich hosted matches at which two football tournaments, in 1954 and 2008?

FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro games used different grounds: 1954 was played at the Hardturm, but neighbours' objections stalled its replacement, so the Letzigrund rebuild was rushed through for 2008.

Which three powers signed the 1859 Treaty of Zurich, ending a war fought over northern Italy?

Austria, France and Sardinia settled it in a roundabout way: Austria ceded Lombardy to France, and France then passed the region on to Sardinia.

Which Zurich restaurant, mocked in its early days as the 'root bunker', does Guinness list as the world's oldest vegetarian restaurant?

Haus Hiltl takes its name from a tailor: Ambrosius Hiltl gave up meat on his doctor's advice to ease his rheumatism, became manager of the struggling vegetarian café in 1903, and his family still runs it.

Which knight overthrew Zurich's council in 1336 with the craftsmen's help, brought the guilds into government and became mayor for life?

Rudolf Brun sided with craftsmen who had been barred from politics, banished the leading merchant patricians and gave thirteen new guilds half the council's seats, then ruled as mayor until 1360.

The Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn of 1847, the first railway line running wholly within Switzerland, linked Zurich with which town?

Baden's speciality was the Spanisch Brötli, a flaky bun; the story goes that Zurich's gentry sent servants out by train to fetch them still warm, though how the nickname really arose is not recorded.

Zurich's Platzspitz became notorious for its open drug scene in the 1980s under what nickname?

Needle Park grew because the city gave up chasing users from place to place and tolerated them in one spot; when police cleared it in 1992 the scene simply moved to a disused railway station nearby, shut in turn in 1995.

Which city in south-west China, Zurich's twin town since 1982, gave it a lakeside Chinese Garden?

Kunming's gift was a thank-you: Zurich had helped the city expand its water supply and its drainage, and craftsmen from both cities built the garden by the lake in 1993.

At the end of 2024, which country's citizens formed Zurich's largest foreign community?

Germany's lead is a comeback: about a fifth of Zurich was German in 1910, and after a treaty opened Swiss jobs to EU workers in 2002 the city's German count more than doubled within a decade.

Some 80 bronze fountains in Zurich would keep running through a citywide power cut; what supplies them?

A gravity-fed spring network, separate from the mains, carries hill spring water downhill to about 400 fountains without pumps, so some 80 bronze emergency fountains keep running when the power fails.

Which two colours make up the divided shield on Zurich's coat of arms?

White and blue also flew on Zurich's war banner, which carried a red streamer; after one victory the Duke of Lorraine cut it off as an honour, and the puzzled Zurichers, who were proud of it, sewed it back on.

Which illuminated manuscript of medieval German love songs was begun in Zurich around 1300?

The Manesse Codex probably grew from the song collection of a Zurich patrician family, yet the city does not hold it: after more than two centuries in the French royal library in Paris it went to Heidelberg in 1888, and there it stays.

Builders in Zurich in 2017 found a woman buried around 200 BC in a hollowed-out tree trunk; which people was she from?

The Celts buried her in fine wool, a sheepskin coat and a necklace of glass and amber; a warrior with sword, shield and lance had been dug up some 80 metres away in 1903, and the two may well have known each other.

Which Zurich district, Kreis 5, is home to the Prime Tower and the shops under the railway viaduct arches?

Industriequartier's factories moved out and left their halls behind: a gear works made way for the Prime Tower, shops fill the viaduct arches, and the city's main theatre plays in a hall where ships were once built.

Who elects Zurich's nine-member city government, the Stadtrat?

The city's voters elect all nine directly every four years; the nine then share out the departments among themselves and govern as one body, deciding jointly rather than under a chief.

Which faith's communities did the canton of Zurich first recognise only in the 2000s?

Judaism had deep roots by then: twelve men founded Zurich's main congregation in 1862, the year legal curbs on Jews in the canton fell, yet the canton recognised it only after a 2005 vote, over 140 years later.

Which architect designed his last building, a colourful steel-and-glass pavilion, for Zurich's lakeshore?

Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born master of raw concrete, died in 1965 with the pavilion unfinished; opened in 1967 for the collector Heidi Weber, it is the only building he made of steel and glass.

Which European conflict prompted Zurich to begin a new ring of star-shaped ramparts?

The Thirty Years' War scared the council into ramparts so costly that a new wealth tax fell on the countryside unasked; villagers around Wädenswil rose against it in 1646, and city troops crushed the revolt.