The guardian angel
An eleven-metre painted figure with gilded wings above the hall.
Ikiwaner — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Tony Badwy — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Thomas Woodtli from Zürich, Switzerland — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Thomas Woodtli from Zürich, Switzerland — CC BY-SA 2.0
The short answer: at the main station. Swiss law closes shops on Sundays and the whole of Bahnhofstrasse shuts, but shops inside major stations and airports are exempt — which is why ShopVille under the station, with its shops, restaurants and supermarket, opens every day of the year. Make Sunday your lake, museum and walking day, and leave buying and a quick meal to the station or the airport.
Honestly: not as a standalone sight — it is a busy working station, not a museum. But you will pass through it anyway, so give it twenty deliberate minutes: stand under the angel in the main hall, look at the façade from the station square, and walk through ShopVille. In December the calculation changes completely: the Christmas market inside the hall is a real reason to come, and warmer than the open-air markets in the cold.
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Switzerland's largest railway station and one of Europe's busiest: twenty-six tracks across several levels, above and below ground, and more than 400,000 passengers on an ordinary working day. It opened in **1847** as the terminus of the first Swiss railway, between Zurich and Baden; the present building, with its neo-Renaissance front by Jakob Friedrich Wanner, replaced it in 1871. Its main hall has become a city square more than a passage to a train. Since **1997** Niki de Saint Phalle's *L'Ange Protecteur* has hung there: an eleven-metre painted figure with gilded wings, a gift from Securitas for the station's own 150th anniversary and now one of the city's landmarks. From late November the same hall turns into a Christmas market of well over a hundred stalls until 24 December — among the largest indoor Christmas markets in Europe. For a visitor there is a more practical point still: beneath the station, ShopVille holds some hundred and ninety shops and eating places and **opens on Sundays** — a rare exception in a country where retail shuts completely on a Sunday. Direct trains leave from here to the airport in about a quarter of an hour, to Lucerne in around three quarters, and to Bern and Basel in about an hour.
An eleven-metre painted figure with gilded wings above the hall.
Over 100 stalls inside the hall from late November to 24 December.
190 shops and eateries underground, open seven days a week.
Bahnhofplatz, 8001 Zürich