Platzspitz Park

About this place

A triangular park at the confluence of the **Limmat and the Sihl**, behind the Swiss National Museum and five minutes' walk from the central station. In the fourteenth century it was the city's hunting and shooting ground, later laid out as a formal promenade in the eighteenth. It holds some of Zurich's oldest plane trees, a bandstand left over from the Swiss National Exhibition of 1883, and a monument to the poet Salomon Gessner. But its name is internationally attached to a dark chapter: in 1987 the authorities chose to tolerate open drug use here in order to confine the problem to one place, and the park became **Europe's largest open drug scene**, drawing thousands a day and known in the world's press as "Needle Park". Police cleared it in February 1992 and it was shut for a full year to be cleaned and rebuilt. That experience pushed Zurich towards a treatment-based policy that other cities have since studied and copied. Today it is an ordinary, entirely quiet park: office workers eating lunch on the grass, families, and a police presence heavier than in other green spaces. Do not come as a destination in itself — but it is an excellent green pause before or after the National Museum next door, and the meeting of the two rivers is worth a few minutes' standing.