Short answers, pulled from the story.
As of the end of 2024, the municipality of Zurich had a population of 436,551. The urban area was home to approximately 1.45 million people as of 2020, and the wider metropolitan area had a total population of around 2.1 million as of 2020.
Zurich was founded by the Romans, who called it Turicum. The earliest written record of the name appears on a 2nd-century tombstone referring to it as the Statio Turicensis Quadragesima Galliarum, meaning the Zurich post for collecting the 2.5% value tax of the Galliae. The name Turicum is interpreted as a derivation from the Gaulish personal name Turos.
Zurich became a primary centre of the Protestant Reformation in 1519 under Huldrych Zwingli, who served as the main preacher at the Grossmunster. Zwingli translated the Bible into the local variety of German; the Zurich Bible was printed by Christoph Froschauer in 1531. Zwingli died defending the Canton of Zurich in the Battle of Kappel, and Heinrich Bullinger succeeded him as the city's spiritual leader.
In the 1980s, Zurich developed a public open drug scene in a park that became known as Needle Park. In the 1990s, the city pioneered a harm reduction strategy that introduced clean syringe distribution, supervised safe injection rooms, and low-threshold methadone dispensaries. This approach significantly reduced drug-related mortality and permanently dismantled the city's open drug scenes.
ETH Zurich has 21 Nobel Laureates associated with it. The institution was founded by the Swiss Confederation in 1854 and opened in 1855 as a polytechnic institute. It has consistently ranked in the top 10 universities worldwide since 2016.
The Dada movement was founded in Zurich in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. After the Nazi takeover in Germany and through World War II, Zurich became a refuge for artists including Max Bill, Marcel Breuer, Camille Graeser, and Richard Paul Lohse, who maintained ateliers in the city.