One Day in Zug, Switzerland | Personal Euro Tours

Before you go — the town nobody gets off the train for

Zug is twenty-five minutes from Zurich on a fast train and roughly the same from Lucerne. Almost every visitor to Switzerland passes within a few miles of it and almost none of them stop.
What is there is a genuinely medieval lakeside old town — painted houses, a clock tower, a town wall, churches — with none of the crowd that the same thing draws in Lucerne twenty minutes away.
It is a half-day town, honestly told. You will not fill twelve hours here. That is precisely why it works as the quiet half of a day that starts or ends somewhere busier.

There is no lift, no summit and no ticketed attraction you have to buy. The old town, the wall, the churches and the lakefront are all free.
It is a regular Swiss town rather than a resort, so a coffee or a plate of food costs what it costs anywhere in the country rather than what it costs in Lucerne’s old town.
Getting here is an ordinary train fare on an ordinary line, covered by every regional and national pass.

Start at Kolinplatz and work outwards. Painted facades, a fountain, and the lanes running down towards the water.
The Zytturm — the clock tower — is the thing everyone photographs, and it deserves it: the tiled roof in the cantonal colours, the coat of arms, and a clock face that tracks the moon as well as the hour.
Walk the surviving stretch of town wall and its towers. From up behind it the roofs of the old town stack down towards the lake in a way no photograph quite conveys.
Read the plaque. Set into a wall in the old town is a memorial to the Mordnacht of 9 September 1275 — the night the Aargau nobility planned to fall on the townspeople in their sleep, and a fisherman named Hänsli Uttiger gave the plot away. Seven hundred and fifty years later the town still has his name up.

All of the above is free and takes a comfortable two hours.
The churches — St Oswald’s in the old town, and the big neo-Gothic one above it — are open, free, and worth going inside rather than photographing from the square.

Zuger Kirschtorte is not a tourist invention. It was created in this town in 1915 and it is still made here: layers of nut meringue and sponge, buttercream, and a good deal of local kirsch.
Buy it in a bakery rather than a restaurant. It is one of the few Swiss specialities that is genuinely cheaper and better in the place it comes from.

A slice from a bakery is a fraction of the same slice on a lakeside terrace, and it is the same cake.
Zug has ordinary supermarkets a short walk from the old town. Lakeside lunch for the price of a sandwich is the obvious move here.

The lakefront promenade runs south from the old town under bare plane trees, past jetties and boat moorings, with the mountains at the far end.
On a still grey winter day the lake goes completely flat and the whole thing turns into a study in three shades of grey. We were here in January and it was the best thing about the visit.
Look up while you are walking. The other Zug — the low-tax canton, the commodity traders, the glass offices — sits a few streets behind the medieval one, and the contrast is the most honest thing about the town.

The promenade costs nothing and is the main event of the afternoon.
Boat trips on the Zugersee run in season and are pleasant rather than essential. If your budget allows one boat in Switzerland, spend it on Lake Lucerne or Lake Geneva instead.

Zug is quiet after dark and there is no shame in saying so. Eat here if you are staying, but the honest advice is to use Zug as the calm half of a day and sleep somewhere with more going on.
If you do stay: the old town in the evening, lit and empty, is the version of a Swiss medieval town that people imagine and rarely find.

A room here is usually cheaper than the equivalent in Lucerne or Zurich and the train back into either is short. If you are on a tight budget over several nights, that arithmetic is worth running.