Basel: Gates, the Rhine and the First Museum
A red sandstone town on the elbow of the Rhine — the gate that survived the great earthquake, a scarlet town hall built to celebrate joining Switzerland, Erasmus's grave, and the first art collection a city ever bought for its citizens.
This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.
At ~65 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in Basel makes a full-day itinerary.
Nearby walks within 150 km
- Bern: Arcades, the Clock and the Bears — 6 stops, ~45 min
- Heart of Zurich: Altstadt Highlights Walking Tour — 8 stops, ~65 min
- Lucerne: Bridges, Wall and the Dying Lion — 6 stops, ~70 min
More walks in Switzerland
- Geneva: Calvin's City and the Lake — 7 stops, ~75 min
All Switzerland walking tours · All 149 routes
Basel, Switzerland · ~65 min · 3.0 km · 6 stops
Stops on this walk
1. Spalentor
One of three surviving gates from a wall that had forty of them.
Basel's inner wall went up after the earthquake of 1356, which levelled most of the city and remains the most destructive seismic event recorded in central Europe. The Spalentor dates from about 1400 and guarded the road from Alsace. In the nineteenth century Basel demolished its walls, as nearly every European city did. Three gates were kept, and this is the grandest — red sandstone, a portcullis still in place, and two side towers. The figures on the field-facing side include the Virgin and two prophets: a gate was also a claim about who protected the town.
The stone is the same red sandstone as the cathedral and the town hall. Basel is built out of one quarry, and that is why the old town reads as a single object.
2. Market Square and Town Hall
A scarlet town hall built to celebrate joining Switzerland.
Basel joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501, as its eleventh member and the first city that was not in the Alpine core. It built this town hall immediately afterwards, between 1504 and 1514, and painted it the colour it still is. Look at the courtyard: the frescoes, the clock, the gilded figures, and the statue of Munatius Plancus, the Roman general Basel claimed as its founder. A new member of a confederation of farmers and mountaineers was making a case that it belonged and that it was older than any of them.
Every Swiss town hall is modest. This one is not — and that is the point. Basel was a rich Rhine trading city joining a poor alliance, and it said so in paint.
3. Middle Bridge
One of the oldest crossings of the Rhine, and the reason Basel exists.
A bridge was first thrown across here in 1226. For centuries it was the only fixed crossing of the Rhine between Lake Constance and the sea, which made Basel a toll point on the main north-south trade route of Europe and paid for everything you are looking at. The present bridge was built in 1903-1905, but stand on it and the geography is unchanged: the Rhine turns north here, from an east-west river into the one that runs to the Netherlands. Basel sits exactly on the elbow, and the borders of Switzerland, France and Germany meet two kilometres downstream.
In summer people float down this river with their clothes in a waterproof bag and climb out downstream. A working border river used as a public swimming pool is a very Basel idea.
4. Basel Minster
Red sandstone above the Rhine, and the grave of Erasmus.
The Minster is Romanesque underneath and Gothic on top: the 1356 earthquake brought down five towers and the choir, and the rebuilding is visible as a change of style partway up. Behind it the Pfalz terrace hangs over the river with the Black Forest on the horizon. Erasmus of Rotterdam died in Basel in 1536 and is buried in the north aisle. He had come for the printers — Basel was one of Europe's great publishing towns — and he stayed because the city let him remain Catholic while it turned Protestant around him. The cathedral itself became Protestant in 1529 and was stripped; his tomb was left.
A Protestant city keeping a Catholic humanist's grave in its stripped cathedral is the whole of Basel's temperament in one room.
5. Kunstmuseum Basel
The first art collection a city ever bought for its citizens.
In 1661 the city of Basel bought the Amerbach Cabinet — the collection of a local family, full of Holbein — to stop it leaving for Amsterdam. It is generally counted as the first art collection anywhere to be acquired by a municipality and opened to the public. That is 132 years before the Louvre. The collection still anchors the museum and includes the largest group of Holbein paintings in the world. The building you are standing in front of went up in 1936; a newer wing was added across the street in 2016.
Basel has about 200,000 people and roughly forty museums. A trading city that bought art before anyone thought museums were a public duty has never stopped.
6. St. Alban Gate
The quiet gate, beside the canal that made Basel a paper town.
The third surviving gate, from about 1400, sits in a corner of the old town most visitors never reach. Beside it runs the St. Alban-Teich, a canal dug by monks in the twelfth century to drive mills. Those mills made paper. Basel had the printers, the university from 1460, and the water — and paper, printing and humanism grew here together. The canal still runs, and a working paper mill museum a few hundred metres along it still makes sheets by hand.
Erasmus came to Basel for the presses, and the presses were here because of this ditch. Ideas follow infrastructure more often than the other way round.