Sankt Gallen Things to Do

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The Old City has some really interesting architecture, St. Gallen is known for it's ornately decorated oriels (bay windows) and half timbered houses. There are 111 oriels in St. Gallen, mostly built between 1650 and 1720. I would have loved to have a guided tour or at least a guide to the significance behind some of the decoration but it was rather late in the afternoon when we arrived.

Much of the Old City is pedestrian only with lots of little shops and bakeries and chocolate stores, many of which were closing up right after we arrived.

Take a look at the other photos if you like detailed architecture and I've put a few more into a travelogue.

Photo #1 heads of an African and an Indian
Photo #2 the figure of Justice, blindfolded and carrying a sword and scales
Photo #3 dated 1707, features my favorite reptile, the snake
Photo #4 Two bears with axes holding a crown aloft, the words "Zum Baren" appear on it
Photo #5 dated 1765, features a star

Regrettably closed by the time we got to St. Gallen, this should be a must see if you visit St. Gallen as the pictures I've seen are incredible! The library holds 130,000 volumes (and I thought I had a lot of books!) and the library is decorated in the baroque style with beautiful ceiling paintings.

This website is a PDF file of a brochure for the Abbey of St. Gallen that has a photo of the beautiful library.

There is an admisson charge. Open Monday to Saturday: 10 - 17, Sunday: 10 - 16

As we were looking at the map we notice a VERY large lake, Lake Constance, that was sandwiched between Switzerland, Germany and Austria so I routed us so that we could at least take a peek at the lake on our way from Liechtenstein to St. Gallen. And that's pretty much all we did, we drove through Rorschach (no connection to the Rorschach inkblot test which was named after the developer, Hermann Rorschach) which is a pretty little medieval lakefront town, and then back to the highway onto St. Gallen.

If you want to visit Lake Constance, Rorschach might be a nice place to stay, looks like there is sailing, rowing, fishing, windsurfing and swimming from here as well as a nice lakefront promenade where you can walk or bike. Other Swiss towns along the lake are Horn, Arbon and Romanshorn.

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For the 3rd time in a week, we wandered into a festival that we didn't know about, this one was on a Friday evening in mid August and was probably my favorite of the bunch as it centered around food! Had we stayed a little later, there appeared to also be a lot of music and dancing and drinking but we didn't want to test the drunk driving laws in Switzerland and we were quite a distance from our hotel.

They were just setting up a lot of the food booths when we arrived around 5pm so we had a walk through town and then started figuring out where we would start eating. The 1st thing we tried was spatzle with cheese and onion, then we moved to the guy selling raclette, followed by a sausage and capped off with a banana nutella crepe. YUM!

In St. Gallen was a centre of embroidery and they even specialised it to make finest lace. Even today some noble cloth comes from St. Gallen and they produce machines for the production of lace and embroidery.

There is a textile museum about the history of cloth and lace in St. Gallen. The exhibition is well done, a nice mixture of multimedia presentation and historical things.

It costs 5 sFr entry fee and is opened Mo - Sa, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm and 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm.

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The Church of St. Laurenzen is a noteworthy reformed city church. The building is old and dating back to the 15th century - however the church as you see it now owes its look to a remodeling/renovation of 1850/54 in neo-gothic style. The importance of the Church of St. Laurenzen has to do with the Reformation: at that time it was the major religious reformed centre of the city.

It is possible to visit the church (at specific times), and in particular the church tower, for amazing city views. The church and the tower rooms remain closed on Sundays, except for mass.

Opening times of the church:
Monday 9:30am - 11:30am and 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Tuesday to Saturday 9:30am - 4:00pm
Thursday 9:30am - 7:00pm

Opening times of the tower:
Monday to Saturday 9:30am - 11:30am and 2:00pm - 4:00pm

The new Palatinate, Neue Pfalz in German, is the former residence of the prince-abbot and it belongs to the Monastery's complex. More precisely it is located on the east side of the monastery square. When the monastery ceased to be a religious home, the government of Kanton Sankt Gallen took over this residence and used it as its headqaurters.

If you visit it, you can still see the throne of the prince-abbot, and the ceremonial and festival hall - which became the assembly hall of the Parliament in the 19th century. There used to be cellars, too, in the palace; recently they have been converted into meeting and assembly rooms.

The cathedral is a work from the late baroque period and was built between 1755 and 1767. I must say that I enjoyed it much more from the outside than from the inside... a bit too rich and opulent.

There are several stucco works and interesting carvings, and plenty of green malachite statues. it's very light (in the sense of luminous) inside but maybe a bit too heavy on decoarations.

Worth admiring is the choir area: it has 84 stunning carved seats. And don't miss the historical organ, as it is very pretty.