The Chagall windows
Five windows, each ruled by one colour, from 1970.
Franz Schmid — Public domain · Andrew Bossi — CC BY-SA 2.5 · Roland zh — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Roland zh — CC BY-SA 3.0
Its slim green spire is one of the best-known shapes on Zurich's skyline, but its origin is far older: an **abbey for noblewomen** founded in 853 by Louis the German for his daughter Hildegard. Its abbesses came to hold the rights of coinage, market and toll in the city — effectively ruling Zurich for centuries — until the abbey was dissolved in 1524 with the Reformation. Today it is a plain reformed parish church on Münsterhof square. The real reason to go inside is at the east end: **five stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall**, installed in 1970 when he was in his eighties, each governed by a single colour — blue, green, red, yellow — and each telling a biblical episode. In the north transept stands a further nine-metre window by Augusto Giacometti from the 1940s. The crypt, on ninth-century foundations, reopened to visitors in 2016. The interior is small and half an hour covers it, and the glass needs a bright day to be read properly — on an overcast afternoon the windows lose much of their force. The church faces the **Grossmünster** across the Limmat, a bridge and three minutes' walk apart, so see the two together on one old-town circuit.
Five windows, each ruled by one colour, from 1970.
Nine metres of glass in the north transept.
Foundations of the original abbey, reopened in 2016.
Münsterhof 2, 8001 Zurich
St. Peter's ChurchThis is Zurich's oldest parish church site: excavations beneath the choir have t2 minutes walk4.6
Wasserkirche (Water Church)A small late-Gothic church on the bank of the Limmat between the Grossmünster an2 minutes walk4.5
Zurich Town Hall (Rathaus)The Rathaus is a restrained baroque building put up between **1694 and 1698** in3 minutes walk4.5
GrossmünsterThe Grossmünster's twin domed towers sign every Zurich skyline — a twelfth-centu3 minutes walk4.4
Rathausbrücke (the Vegetable Bridge)A short, unusually wide bridge over the Limmat between Zurich's town hall and th3 minutes walk4.8Both — they stand on opposite banks, three minutes apart. But if you must choose: **Fraumünster for the interior**, because of the Chagall windows, which have no equal in Zurich, and **Grossmünster for its exterior and its tower climb**, for the view over the old town and the lake. The Grossmünster's interior is austere and stripped of ornament after the Reformation, so expect little from it visually.
Yes — and it is among the cheapest tickets in an expensive city. Five francs for the Chagall windows and the crypt is good value by Swiss standards, where a museum ticket starts at around twenty. Sit on a bench facing the east end for ten minutes rather than walking straight through; the colours shift as the sun moves.