Aarau

• 1. Introduction

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  Aarau sits on a rocky outcrop above the Aare river, a town that has been claimed, renamed, and reborn more times than almost any other place in Switzerland. In just the span of a few months in 1798, it went from a regional backwater to the capital of a new unified nation. The question worth asking is: how does a town of a few thousand people, wedged between Zurich, Bern, and Basel, become the birthplace of modern Switzerland? The answer begins almost a thousand years earlier, in a valley shaped by glaciers, rivers, and the ambitions of counts who no longer exist.

• 2. Founded by Counts, Freed by Kings

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  Around AD 1240, the counts of Kyburg established Aarau on a narrow rocky spur where the Aare valley pinched tight. The settlement's name was first written down in 1248 as Arowe. By 1256, a settlement large enough to be called a city had taken shape. The counts ruled from the Rore Tower, a structure still standing today at the center of the city hall.

  In 1273, the Kyburg line died out. Agnes of Kyburg, with no male heirs, sold the family's lands to King Rudolf I von Habsburg. A decade later, in 1283, Rudolf granted Aarau its formal city rights. The gift came with its own complications; the town now belonged to a dynasty that would shape European history for centuries.

  Throughout the 14th century, the city grew behind a second defensive wall, with a deep ditch separating the city proper from the surrounding suburb. Today, that ditch is remembered only in the name of a wide street: the Graben, which means Ditch in German. In 1415, Bern invaded lower Aargau with the help of Solothurn, and Aarau was forced to capitulate and swear allegiance to new rulers.

• 3. The Protestant Turn

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  In March 1528, the citizens of Aarau voted to accept Protestantism at the urging of the Bernese. The vote had visible, immediate consequences. Inside the town church, which had been built between 1471 and 1478, all twelve altars and their accompanying pictures were destroyed. The Reformation reshaped not just belief but architecture.

  The 16th century brought population growth that pushed buildings taller and packed construction tighter. Early forms of industry appeared, but Aarau never followed the guild system common in other Swiss cities. That absence may have left the town more open to outside ideas and immigrants.

  German immigrants arriving in the early 18th century brought cotton and silk factories with them, establishing a textile industry that would anchor the local economy for over a century. These same immigrants, highly educated by the standards of the time, introduced educational reform and, according to contemporaneous accounts, fed the enlightened and revolutionary spirit that would define Aarau in 1798.

• 4. Capital of a New Nation

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  On the 27th of December 1797, the last Tagsatzung of the Old Swiss Confederacy convened in Aarau. Two weeks after that meeting, a French envoy arrived and continued stoking the city's revolutionary mood. The contrast in Aarau between a highly educated population and severely restricted political rights was, by all accounts, particularly sharp.

  When French troops occupied Aarau by mid-March 1798, the city did not resist. On the 22nd of March 1798, Aarau was declared the capital of the Helvetic Republic, making it the first capital of a unified Switzerland. The national parliament met in the city hall. The arrangement lasted less than six months; on the 20th of September, the capital moved to Lucerne.

  The significance of those months, brief as they were, has never faded. Five years later, in 1803, Napoleon ordered the fusion of the cantons of Aargau, Baden, and Fricktal, and Aarau was declared capital of the enlarged canton that resulted. The town that had briefly held the whole country in its city hall now settled into a durable role as a regional seat of power.

• 5. Schools, Libraries, and Nobel Prizes

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  In 1802, the Canton School opened in Aarau as the first non-parochial high school in Switzerland. Its secular nature gave it an unusual range of students and an unusual reputation. Among the young people who studied there: Albert Einstein, Paul Karrer, and Werner Arber, all of whom would later win Nobel Prizes.

  A year after the Canton School was founded, the purchase of a manuscript collection in 1803 laid the foundation for what became the Cantonal Library. The library's holdings include a Bible annotated by Huldrych Zwingli, along with manuscripts and incunabula. The old Cantonal School building and the Cantonal Library are both listed today as heritage sites of national significance.

  The city's cultural infrastructure kept expanding across the following century and a half. A Theatre and Concert Hall was built in 1883 and renovated again in 1995-96. The Aargau Nature Museum opened in 1922. A former cloth warehouse became a small theatre in 1974, and the alternative culture center KIFF was later established in a former animal fodder factory. Beginning in 1820, Aarau also became a refuge for political exiles.

• 6. Industry, Rise and Retreat

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  Kern and Co., founded in 1819, built Aarau a global reputation for precision. The company manufactured geodetic instruments that were sold internationally for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1988, it was taken over by Wild Leitz, and by 1991 it was closed entirely.

  The broader textile industry that had sustained Aarau through the 18th and early 19th centuries collapsed around 1850, undone by the protectionist tariff policies of neighboring states. In its place, the city developed production of mathematical instruments, shoes, and cement. From 1900 onward, electrical enterprises multiplied. By the 1960s, more residents worked in services or for the canton government than in manufacturing, and during the 1980s much of what remained of Aarau's industry departed.

  Aarau's population tracked these economic shifts. Growth was continuous from 1800 to around 1960, when the city reached a peak of 17,045 residents. Since then the population fell by around 8%, driven by three factors: no major new housing developments after the completion of the Telli apartment complex, smaller household sizes, and migration to surrounding municipalities. The city has more than 24,000 jobs despite a residential population of roughly 16,000, meaning it draws workers from communities all around it every working day.

• 7. The Living Old Town

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  The "Schlössli," or small castle, dates from shortly after 1200 and is the oldest building in Aarau. The Rore Tower and the upper gate tower have stood largely unchanged since the 13th century. City hall was built around the Rore Tower in 1515, folding the medieval fortress into the civic machinery of a later age.

  The town church, rebuilt between 1471 and 1478, still stands. Beside it sits the Justice Fountain, the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen, built in 1634 from French limestone with a sandstone statue of Lady Justice. It stood in front of city hall for nearly three centuries until traffic forced a move to its current position in front of the town church in 1905.

  Aarau is sometimes called the City of Beautiful Gables, a nickname earned by the painted gables of the old town buildings. The old town itself forms an irregular square divided into four sections called Stöcke. Nearly all the medieval structures were rebuilt or expanded during a wave of construction in the 16th century; the architectural character of the city effectively froze in the 18th century, when growth pushed past the still-standing walls. The upper gate tower still houses a jail, as it has since the Middle Ages, and a carillon installed there in the middle of the 20th century uses bells made by bell manufacturers who have been based in Aarau for centuries.

• 8. Notable People and Ongoing Life

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  Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, born in Aarau in 1770, became the first director of the United States Coast Survey. Maximilian Bircher-Benner, born there in 1867, was the physician who popularized muesli. Ricardo Feller, born in 2000, became the ADAC GT Masters champion.

  The football club FC Aarau plays at the Stadion Brügglifeld and has won the Swiss Cup once, in 1985, along with three national championships in 1912, 1914, and 1993. The Argovia Stars play ice hockey in the MySports League, the third highest tier in Switzerland, at the 3,000-seat KeBa Aarau Arena.

  Each May, the city hosts the Jazzaar Festival. Every Saturday morning a vegetable market runs in the Graben. On the first Wednesday of November, Aarau holds the Rüeblimärt, a carrot fair, in the same location. Aarau's railway station is a terminus of the S-Bahn Zürich S11 line and regularly appears in annual statistics among Switzerland's most-used stations. The Aargauer Zeitung, Switzerland's fifth largest newspaper, has one of its two head offices in the city, alongside the studios of the Tele M1 television channel.