Chur

Chur lies where the Plessur joins the Rhine, and people lived here in prehistoric times; the remains of an early settlement and of a Roman vicus have been dug up in the Welschdörfli district. Rome conquered the area in 15 BC, and under the emperor Diocletian at the end of the 3rd century Curia Raetorum became the capital of the new province of Raetia prima. In the 4th century it became the seat of the first Christian bishopric north of the Alps; its first recorded bishop, Asinio, appears in 451.

The bishops became the town's lords. Magyar raiders destroyed the cathedral in 925–926 and Saracens attacked in the 940s and 950s, but Chur prospered where several Alpine transit routes met and continued down the Rhine. Otto I granted it the right to collect tolls in 952, and in 1170 the bishop became a prince-bishop. To resist him and the Habsburgs, the League of God's House was founded in Chur in 1367. After a fire destroyed most of the town in 1464, the emperor Frederick III granted the citizens rights that freed them from the bishop's rule.

The Reformation came with Johannes Comander, parish priest of St Martin's from 1523; by 1527 all of Chur except the bishop's estates had turned Protestant, and German slowly displaced Romansh as the town's language. Another fire in 1574 destroyed about half the town. When Graubünden joined Switzerland as a canton in 1803, Chur became its capital. The railway arrived in 1858, the Arosa line in 1914, and the town has grown by merging with Maladers in 2020, Haldenstein in 2021 and Tschiertschen-Praden in 2025.

The bishop's quarter and the Protestant town below it still shape Chur's character. The cathedral, built between 1154 and 1270, remains the seat of the Catholic diocese, while St Martin's on the Martinsplatz is the old Reformed parish church. Today the town is mixed: at the end of 2025 about 31 per cent of residents were Catholic, about 24 per cent Reformed, and the rest belonged to other faiths or none.

German is the everyday language, and Chur speaks the Swiss German dialect of the Rhine valley, but many residents grow up bilingual with Romansh or Italian, the canton's other official languages. The town's cultural life runs through the Theater Chur, the Klibühni and the Postremise, the open-air theatre staged every summer since 1981, and the town festival at the end of August.

Chur's best-known modern artist is H. R. Giger, who was born here in 1940 and shared an Academy Award for the visual design of the 1979 film Alien; the bar he designed in the Kalchbühl district opened in 1992. The Bündner Kunstmuseum gathers the art of the canton, from Angelica Kauffmann to the Giacometti family. In sport, the Calanda Broncos, an American football team, won the Eurobowl in 2012.

Chur had about 36,000 residents at the end of 2020, before Tschiertschen-Praden merged into it in 2025; in 2014 roughly a fifth of residents were foreign nationals. As the canton's capital it is above all a town of offices and services: the cantonal government and parliament, the diocese, the Fachhochschule Graubünden and the headquarters of the Rhaetian Railway are all here, and the town counted more than 32,000 jobs in 2014.

Life is lived between the old town, with its restaurants and squares, and the residential districts that spread across the flat ground of the Plessur's alluvial fan. The Bahnhofstrasse is where the town shops, and in summer the Quaderwiese and Fontana Park fill with people sunbathing, reading and playing football.

The mountains begin at the edge of town. A cable car climbs from Chur to the ski and walking area of Brambrüesch, whose bike park draws mountain bikers from far away, and because most of the Arosa ski area lies on land owned by Chur's citizens' community, Chur residents are treated as locals when they buy season passes there.

Chur eats the food of Graubünden. Capuns are made from spätzle dough with pieces of dried meat such as Bündnerfleisch or salsiz sausage, rolled in a chard leaf, boiled in a broth of bouillon, milk and water and served covered in grated cheese. Maluns are boiled potatoes, grated and mixed with a little flour, then fried slowly in butter and stirred until they form small golden crumbs; they are usually served with apple compote.

Bündnerfleisch, also called Bindenfleisch or viande des Grisons, is the air-dried meat produced in the canton, and one of the dried meats that go into capuns. The Bündner Nusstorte, a caramelised walnut-filled pastry also known as the Engadiner Nusstorte, was invented in the 1920s and became widely available in the 1960s.

Restaurants serving Graubünden specialities include a guild house and old inns around the Pfisterplatz, the Goldgasse and the Postplatz. Down the Rhine valley, Maienfeld is known for its wine as well as for Heidi.