Canton of Zürich, Switzerland

The city of Zurich, where the Limmat leaves the lake, is the canton's capital and the base for almost every visit to it. Within its limits lie the medieval old town on both banks of the river with the Grossmünster and the Fraumünster, the Kunsthaus and the Swiss National Museum, Bahnhofstrasse, the lake and river baths, and Zurich West.

Winterthur, the canton's second city, made its name with engineering works and locomotive building, and its industrial and trading fortunes paid for the art collections that draw most visitors today. Its old town is compact and almost free of cars, strung along the Marktgasse, a long street of merchant houses and shops with the town hall on it and the twin towers of the town church just off it. On the eastern side of the city, in Oberwinterthur, the Swiss Science Center Technorama fills its halls with hands-on experiments in physics, light and perception.

The collector Oskar Reinhart left his villa Am Römerholz, on a hill above the town, to the Swiss Confederation with the collection it holds: Old Masters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder among them, and French painting of the 19th century from Daumier and Courbet to Manet, Renoir, Cézanne and van Gogh. His German, Swiss and Austrian paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, Caspar David Friedrich and Ferdinand Hodler among them, hang in the museum Reinhart am Stadtgarten in the centre. The Kunst Museum Winterthur beside the Stadthaus covers Impressionism, classical modernism and later art, the Villa Flora keeps the Hahnloser family's paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton and Matisse, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur is devoted to photography.

South of Winterthur, the castle of Kyburg stands on a wooded spur above the Töss valley, at the end of the small village of the same name. It was the seat of the counts of Kyburg, passed to the Habsburgs, and for almost four centuries was the residence of the bailiffs who governed the county for Zurich. Today the castle, with its keep, chapel and residential rooms, is a museum.

Both shores of Lake Zurich belong to the canton for most of the lake's length; only at its upper end do they pass to Schwyz in the south and St. Gallen in the north, whose town of Rapperswil is the turning point of the long boat trip up the lake. The north-east shore, known as the Goldküste, runs through Küsnacht, Erlenbach, Meilen and Stäfa below slopes of vineyards; the south-west shore through Kilchberg, where Thomas Mann is buried, Thalwil, Horgen and Wädenswil. The boats from Bürkliplatz in Zurich call at the villages of both shores, two paddle steamers among them, and a car ferry crosses the lake between Horgen and Meilen. Most of the lakeside villages have a public lido, and the vineyards above the water are the home of Räuschling, an old white grape grown chiefly around this lake.

The Uetliberg, at 871 metres, is the northern end of the Albis, the wooded ridge that runs south along the west side of the Sihl valley, and the S10 climbs to it from Zurich HB in about twenty minutes. From the summit and its lookout tower the view takes in the city, the length of the lake and, on clear days, the Alps from the Appenzell Alps to the Bernese Oberland. A path follows the crest south to Felsenegg, with the Planetenweg, a scale model of the solar system, set out along it.

South of Adliswil, the eastern slope of the Albis carries the Sihlwald, a large beech forest that is no longer logged and has been left to grow wild as part of the Wildnispark Zürich. The Sihltal trains of the S-Bahn stop at Sihlwald, on the edge of the forest, and paths climb from the valley floor to the Albis crest. Nearby at Langnau am Albis, the Langenberg wildlife park, the other half of the Wildnispark, keeps animals of Europe's forests and mountains in large woodland enclosures.

East of the city, two smaller lakes are quieter alternatives to Lake Zurich. A path runs round the Greifensee, much of whose shore is a nature reserve of reeds and wet meadows, the small town of Greifensee keeps its castle beside the water, and boats cross the lake in summer. Further east, the Pfäffikersee lies in protected moorland, with bathing places on its shore and the walls of a Roman fort at Irgenhausen on the rise above it. Beyond the lakes the land climbs into the hills of the Oberland proper, walking country of farms and forest rising to the Bachtel and its lookout tower. In summer a heritage steam railway runs between Bauma, in the Töss valley, and Hinwil.

The Zürcher Weinland, the district of Andelfingen in the north of the canton, is farm and vine country between the Thur and the Rhine, with half-timbered villages such as Stammheim and Marthalen, and trains from Winterthur run north through Andelfingen and Marthalen towards Schaffhausen. Its wine is mostly red, Pinot Noir above all, known here as Blauburgunder. At Flaach the Thur meets the Rhine in the Thurauen, a river mouth restored to floodplain forest and gravel banks. On the canton's northern edge the Rhine Falls drop past Schloss Laufen on their Zurich bank, and just downstream the river loops round Rheinau, where the Baroque church of a former abbey stands on an island in the stream.

West of the Weinland, the Zürcher Unterland reaches the Rhine at Eglisau, a small old town on a slope above the river, which runs broad and slow here and is crossed by a tall railway viaduct. Paths follow the bank in both directions. To the south-west, Regensberg crowns the eastern end of the Lägern ridge: a ring of old houses around a castle with a round tower, set among vineyards, with views over the plain of the Unterland.