4 Best Sights in Zürich, Switzerland

With a varied and high-quality permanent collection of paintings—medieval, Dutch and Italian Baroque, and impressionist—the Kunsthaus is Zürich's best art museum. The collection includes some fascinating Swiss works; others might be an acquired taste. Besides works by Ferdinand Hodler, with their mix of realism and stylization, there's a superb room full of Johann Heinrich Füssli paintings, which hover between the darkly ethereal and the grotesque. And then there's Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Edvard Munch, all satisfyingly represented. A breathtaking modernist expansion of the museum by British architect David Chipperfield was added just across the street in 2021; the two buildings are linked by an underground tunnel. The new wing houses contemporary works and installations. Don't leave before seeing the fabled collection of Cézannes, Manets, Monets, and Degas that Zürich industrialist E. G. Bührle put together in the 1950s in the space of a decade, purchasing the finest offerings from the world's most prestigious art dealers. A whopping 175 pieces from his collection are on long-term loan at the Kunsthaus.

Dancing Indian Shivas, contemplative Tibetan thangkas, late 18th-century literary paintings from China, and royal Benin bronzes from Nigeria—these are just a few of the treasures in the prodigious gathering of non-European art on view. This is the only museum of its kind in Switzerland, with the main focus on Asia, Africa, and ancient America. The main collection is on view in the huge underground Smaragd building. The Villa Wesendonck, the famous neoclassical jewel that was once a fabled home to Richard Wagner (it was for the lady of the house that he wrote his Wesendonck Songs), houses objects from India, the pre-Columbian Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands; there's more Indian, Islamic, and Asian art in an adjacent museum, the Park-Villa Rieter.

An original neo-Gothic building dating from 1889 paired with a new sculptural wing comprises the Swiss National Museum, which displays an enormous collection of objects dating from the Stone Age to modern times. There's an excellent family exhibition with magic carpets, pirates, and models of the old-world Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn that connected Zurich with nearby Baden in the 1800s. It also has a library, bistro, and gift shop. A renovation in 2019 gave the museum a fresh look and an outdoor courtyard connecting it to the Limmat River.

One of Switzerland's most delicate late-Gothic structures, this church displays stained glass by Augusto Giacometti. Both the church and the Helmhaus stand on what was once an island where martyrs Felix and Regula supposedly lost their heads.