Aarau

Aarau lies on the right bank of the Aare River at the southern foot of the Jura Mountains, west of Zurich and close to the border with Solothurn. Its old town occupies a rocky outcrop where the valley narrows, a position that combined river crossing, defense, and control of routes across the Swiss plateau. The name is connected with the German Au, meaning a floodplain. Although the settlement was known by the 1240s, archaeology reveals much older activity: Neolithic objects have been found, a Bronze Age village stood nearby, and a Roman road linked Solothurn with Vindonissa.

Aarau was founded around 1240 by the counts of Kyburg. The counts died out in 1273, and Agnes of Kyburg sold their lands to Rudolf I of Habsburg, who granted Aarau city rights in 1283. The medieval town was centered on the Rore tower, later incorporated into the city hall, and protected by walls and gate towers. Its oldest surviving building, the Schlössli, predates the formal town, while most of the historic center was rebuilt or enlarged during the sixteenth century. The upper gate tower guarded the road toward Lucerne and Bern, and its long use as a jail reminds us that gates controlled both movement and justice.

The Reformation reached Aarau in 1528, when the church’s altars and images were destroyed. In the eighteenth century, German immigrants introduced cotton and silk manufacturing and contributed to a vigorous intellectual and educational life. This combination of prosperity, education, and limited political representation made the town receptive to revolutionary ideas. French troops occupied it in 1798, and on 22 March Aarau was declared the capital of the Helvetic Republic. The capital soon moved, but the episode placed a medium-sized river town at the center of Switzerland’s first modern centralized state. Its irregular old town is organized around four quarters, with painted gables, a town church built between 1471 and 1478, and a seventeenth-century Justice Fountain.