Water services in Switzerland

Cities with pages

A city appears here once enough places in it are mapped

Zurich, a city of fountains

Zurich has more than 1,200 public fountains and the city says every one of them runs drinking water. Around 800 sit on the ordinary mains; the rest are fed by the city's own spring network, roughly 150 kilometres of pipe that also supplies over 80 emergency fountains which keep flowing by gravity if the power goes out.

Nationally the rule runs the other way round from what most visitors assume: a publicly accessible Swiss fountain is taken to carry drinking water, and it is the owner's job either to make sure it does or to hang a sign reading kein Trinkwasser. So the thing to look for is the warning, not a permission.

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