Basel travel guide

Top 10 sights in Basel

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   Kunstmuseum Basel

   The oldest public art collection in the world: Basel's citizens bought the Amerbach cabinet in 1661 and made it public. It holds the greatest group of Holbeins anywhere, and in 1967 the city voted in a referendum to buy two Picassos — at which the artist, delighted, gave it four more.

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   2© Wladyslaw (talk), edits by: Dontpanic (aka Dogcow) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Goetheanum

   Rudolf Steiner's second building on this hill, in poured concrete, after the first — a double wooden dome — burned on New Year's Eve 1922. It is the world centre of anthroposophy and one of the earliest attempts to make expressive sculptural form out of reinforced concrete.

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   3© Guido Radig · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Augusta Raurica

   A Roman colony founded about 44 BC on the Rhine, and the largest Roman site in Switzerland — its theatre seated ten thousand and is the biggest north of the Alps. A hoard of two hundred and seventy pieces of late Roman silver was found here in 1962.

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   Basel Minster

   A red sandstone minster of the twelfth century, damaged by the earthquake of 1356 and rebuilt, and Protestant since 1529. Erasmus is buried in it — he died in Basel in 1536 — and the terrace behind it looks straight down on the Rhine.

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   5© Wladyslaw · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Vitra Design Museum

   Frank Gehry's first building in Europe, opened in 1989 for a furniture company's design collection. The campus around it became an architectural collection in its own right, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Herzog and de Meuron and Álvaro Siza.

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   6

   Beyeler Foundation

   Renzo Piano's museum of 1997 at Riehen, built for the collection of a Basel dealer and his wife — Monet, Cézanne, Giacometti, Rothko — with a glass roof and a wall of glass onto a field. It is the most visited art museum in Switzerland.

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   7

   Basel Zoo

   A zoo of 1874 in the middle of the city, known to every Basler simply as the Zolli. It bred the first Indian rhinoceros born in captivity anywhere, in 1956, and has been central to that species' zoo population ever since.

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   8© Alan Philip Müller from Milano, Italy · CC BY 2.0

   Museum Tinguely

   Mario Botta's museum of 1996 on the Rhine, devoted to Jean Tinguely, who made machines out of scrap that clank, jerk and sometimes destroy themselves. Visitors press the buttons, which is how he wanted it, and the noise carries through the building.

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   9© Basmus · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kunsthalle Basel

   Exhibition hall in Basel founded in 1872, with no collection of its own. It gave Picasso, Klee and Rothko early European showings and stands beside the city's art museum.

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    10© Basmus · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Basel Museum of Ancient Art and Ludwig Collection

    The only museum in Switzerland devoted entirely to the ancient Mediterranean, founded in 1961 to bring the city's scattered antiquities together. Its Greek vases and its Egyptian rooms are the strongest parts, and it is a listed national monument.

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   1© Wladyslaw Sojka · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Dreiländereck

   A monument at Basel in Switzerland marking the point where the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland meet.

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   2© Sissacher · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Jewish Museum of Switzerland

   A museum in Basel in Switzerland. Through ritual objects, art and everyday material from the Middle Ages to the present it sets out the religious and daily life of the Jews of Basel and of Switzerland.

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   3© Roland Zumbühl · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Benedictine abbey of Mariastein

   A Benedictine abbey at Metzerlen-Mariastein in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland. After Einsiedeln it is the second most important place of pilgrimage in the country, and a late Gothic church of three aisles stands over the grace chapel.

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   4© Taxiarchos228 · CC BY 3.0

   Rötteln Castle

   The ruins of a castle above Haagen in Lörrach at the southwestern corner of Baden-Württemberg, ten kilometres northeast of Basel. It was among the strongest fortresses in the region and is now the third largest castle ruin in Baden, standing on a hill at 422 metres.

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   5© Norbert Aepli, Switzerland (User:Noebu) · CC BY 2.5

   Elisabethenkirche

   A nineteenth-century church beside the theatre in the middle of Basel in Switzerland. It is a polished example of Swiss Gothic Revival, with a tower and spire seventy-two metres high.

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   6© Hans Peter Schaefer, www.reserv-a-rt.de · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Schaulager

   Herzog and de Meuron's building of 2003 at Münchenstein, designed as an open store rather than a gallery — works are kept in the conditions they need and can be seen among the racking, which was a new idea. It opens to the public only for exhibitions.

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   7© User:Mattes · CC BY 2.0 de

   Museum of Contemporary Art

   Opened in 1980 and the first public museum in Europe dedicated solely to art since the 1960s. It grew from a foundation set up by a Basel collector and it collects video and installation as seriously as painting.

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   8© Basmus · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Basel Historical Museum

   The historical museum, opened in 1894 in a Franciscan church and now split over three buildings. Its medieval treasury — including the cathedral's plate and the tapestries — and the reconstructed Basel Dance of Death fragments are the core of it.

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   9© JiriMatejicek · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Basel Paper Mill

   A museum of paper, writing and printing in a medieval mill on the Rhine, where visitors make a sheet of paper by hand, set type and pull a print — all of it on working historic equipment. Basel was a European printing centre from the 1470s.

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    10© Basmus · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Natural History Museum of Basel

    A natural history museum founded in 1821 with over eleven million specimens, covering zoology, mineralogy, palaeontology and anthropology. Its collection of fossils from the Swiss Jura is one of the most important in Europe.

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