Geneva travel guide

Top 10 sights in Geneva

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Wikibusters · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Jet d'Eau

   A jet throwing five hundred litres of water a second a hundred and forty metres into the air at two hundred kilometres an hour. It began in 1886 as a pressure release valve for the city's hydraulic system, was found to be popular, and was moved out into the lake and made permanent.

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2. 

   2© Yann (talk) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Pierre Cathedral

   The cathedral from which Calvin preached between 1536 and 1564, stripped of its images at the Reformation and left deliberately plain. His wooden chair is still in the nave, and the excavations beneath the building run back to a fourth-century basilica.

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3. 

   3© Julia Lukmanova · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

   Reformation Wall

   A wall a hundred metres long unveiled in 1909 for the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin's birth, with Calvin, Beza, Farel and Knox carved five metres high in the middle of it. Cromwell, Roger Williams and the Mayflower compact are on the flanking panels.

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4. 

   4© Franck Schneider · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museum of Art and History Geneva

   An encyclopedic museum with over six hundred and fifty thousand objects, from Egyptian and Greek antiquities to watches, arms and painting — Konrad Witz's altarpiece of 1444, the first European picture with a recognisable real landscape, is its best-known work.

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5. 

   5© Philippe Wagneur, Natural History Museum of Geneva (MHNG) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Natural History Museum of Geneva

   The largest natural history museum in Switzerland and one of the biggest in Europe, with over fifteen million specimens. Its Alpine and African dioramas and its geology floor are free, which makes it the standard wet-afternoon answer in Geneva.

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6. 

   6© Markus Schweizer · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Broken Chair

   A wooden chair twelve metres high with one leg blown off, standing opposite the UN since 1997 as a campaign for the treaty banning landmines. It was meant to be temporary; it has stayed, and now also stands for the victims of cluster munitions.

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7. 

   7© Gfuerst · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Ariana Museum

   A museum of ceramics and glass covering twelve centuries, from Islamic and Chinese ware to Meissen and modern studio pottery — some twenty thousand pieces, and the only collection of its kind in Switzerland. Entry is free.

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8. 

   8© Romano1246 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Bodmer Foundation

   A library and museum at Cologny holding what one collector assembled: papyri including some of the earliest fragments of the gospels, a Gutenberg Bible, and manuscripts of Goethe, Mozart and Einstein. It is a UNESCO Memory of the World collection.

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9. 

   9© Julia Lukmanova · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

   International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum

   A museum opened in 1988 opposite the Red Cross headquarters, whose central object is the card index of prisoners of war — seven million handwritten cards from the First World War, filed in wooden drawers, by which families found out whether a man was alive.

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10. 

    10© Torbjorn Toby Jorgensen · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Brunswick Monument

    A mausoleum of 1879 for Charles II, Duke of Brunswick, who left his fortune to Geneva on condition it build him a monument copied from the Scaliger tombs in Verona. The city took the money and complied, in the middle of a lakeside garden.

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1. 

   1© Romano1246 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Palais Wilson

   A lakeside hotel converted in 1920 into the headquarters of the League of Nations, which met in it until moving to the Palais des Nations in 1936. It is named after the American president who proposed the League and whose country never joined it, and now houses the UN human rights office.

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2. 

   2© Port(u*o)s · CC BY 3.0

   Le Lignon

   Housing estate west of Geneva, built between 1963 and 1971 as a continuous block over a kilometre long. It holds ten thousand residents and is listed as heritage.

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3. 

   3© Cc1698 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Parc de La Grange

   Twenty hectares on the lake shore given to the city in 1918, with the largest rose garden in Geneva — some twelve thousand plants — an eighteenth-century house, an orangery and trees old enough to have been planted for a private estate.

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4. 

   4© x70tjw · CC BY-SA 2.0

   L'horloge fleurie

   An outdoor flower clock on the western side of the English Garden in Geneva. Some 6,500 flowers and shrubs make up its face, replanted with the seasons.

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5. 

   5© Alexey M. · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Champel

   District of Geneva on a hill above the Arve, developed from 1856 as a residential quarter. Borges spent his last years here and is buried in the Plainpalais cemetery nearby.

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6. 

   6© Yann (talk) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica Notre-Dame of Geneva

   The principal Catholic church in Geneva, built in 1859 — three centuries after the city expelled Catholic worship at the Reformation. It stands by the station and is a stop on the pilgrim route to Santiago.

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7. 

   7© MHM55 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Geneva Mosque

   The largest mosque in Switzerland, opened at Petit-Saconnex in 1978 with funding from the Muslim World League and inaugurated by the king of Saudi Arabia together with the Swiss president. It serves the city's diplomatic and resident Muslim communities.

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8. 

   8© Credits to Mourad Ben Abdallah / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Russian Orthodox Church of Geneva

   A Russian Orthodox cathedral of 1866 with nine gilded onion domes, built for the Russian aristocracy who wintered on the lake. It was designed by a professor from the imperial academy in St Petersburg and is a protected national monument.

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9. 

   9© Leandro Neumann Ciuffo · CC BY 2.0

   Place du Bourg-de-Four

   A cobbled square in the old town of Geneva. It was the Roman forum and then the medieval market, and in the nineteenth century the stagecoach stop; restaurants and cafés now ring an eighteenth-century marble fountain on it.

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10. 

    10© Romano1246 · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Jardin Anglais

    An urban park in Geneva, laid out in 1855 on the site of the old harbour and its timber yards. The Quai Gustave-Ador starts here, and the flower clock in the park is one of the city's fixed images.

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