Museums in Zurich

Zurich has around fifty museums, which is a great many for its size, and they are the reliable answer to a wet day — see one day in Zurich for how a clear one is better spent.

Five are worth planning around.

Kunsthaus

The serious one, and the reason art historians come to Zurich.

It holds the largest collection of Edvard Munch outside Norway, a very strong Giacometti holding, the Swiss nineteenth century in depth — Hodler, Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead — and a solid run through Impressionism to the present. The Bührle collection arrived with the 2021 extension by David Chipperfield, which roughly doubled the space.

That extension came with an argument the museum now addresses openly: Emil Bührle made his fortune selling arms to Nazi Germany, and the provenance of parts of the collection has been contested for years. The displays discuss it rather than avoid it, which is more than most institutions manage.

Allow two hours minimum. Five minutes from the Grossmünster.

Landesmuseum

In the turreted pile behind the main station, and far better than the description “national museum” suggests.

It runs the whole history of Switzerland from prehistory to the present, and it is unusually good at the awkward parts — the mercenary trade, religious war, the country’s position in both world wars. The extension by Christ & Gantenbein, a folded concrete wing added in 2016, is worth seeing on its own.

The best single museum in the city for understanding where you are. Two hours, and it is directly opposite the station, so it works between trains.

Museum Rietberg

Non-European art — Indian, Chinese, African, Japanese, Buddhist — in a park south of the centre, in a nineteenth-century villa with a modern underground extension entered through a glass pavilion.

It is the only museum of its kind in Switzerland, and the collection is genuinely first-rate rather than merely comprehensive. The park is a good reason to come even if the exhibition does not appeal.

Museum für Gestaltung

The design museum, and the most Swiss institution in the city: posters, typography, industrial design and the graphic tradition that produced Helvetica.

Two sites — the original building on Ausstellungsstrasse and the Toni-Areal, a converted dairy in the west of the city. Small, sharp, and rarely crowded.

FIFA Museum

Football’s own museum, near Enge station, and better than the cynicism it attracts: the World Cup trophy is there, the history is told properly, and the building is well made.

Worth it if football matters to you and skippable if it does not — which is more than can be said for a lot of single-subject museums.

The rest, briefly

• Kulturama — natural history and human evolution, good with children
• Zoologisches and Paläontologisches Museum — university collections, free
• Beyer Clock and Watch Museum — small, under a Bahnhofstrasse shop, and exactly what it says
• Johann Jacobs Museum — the coffee trade and its colonial history, in a villa on the lake
• Zunfthaus zur Meisen — porcelain, in a guild house by the Fraumünster

Practical

Opening hours. Most close on Mondays. Most stay open late one evening a week — Wednesday or Thursday — and that is the quietest time to go.

Cost. Entry is moderate by Swiss standards, and considerably cheaper than an afternoon on a mountain railway.

Free entry. The Kunsthaus is free on Wednesdays. Several university collections are always free. The Zürich Card covers entry to most of the city’s museums along with transport — see tickets and passes — and pays for itself at two museums a day. A Swiss Travel Pass also includes entry to around 500 museums nationally, including most of these.

Where they are. The Kunsthaus, Landesmuseum and Museum für Gestaltung are all within fifteen minutes’ walk of the main station. The Rietberg and the FIFA Museum need a tram.