Switzerland · CH

Museum am Dorfplatz Gais

The Museum am Dorfplatz in the Appenzell village of Gais is devoted to a single, charmingly specific idea: showing how one small Swiss spa village looked and lived between roughly 1750 and 1900. Its core is a graphic collection of more than 200 views of Gais—copper, steel and wood engravings, aquatints, drawings and photographs—gathered over decades and reinstalled in 2021 as a compact, modern local museum on the village square. The highlight is the unique pen-and-ink work of Johann Ulrich Fitzi (1798–1855), whose seven-part panoramas of the village fill an entire wall. The collection grew out of Gais's heyday as a whey-cure spa town, when artists produced souvenir views for visiting guests; today they read as a vivid record of how the village developed. Housed in a reconstructed timber townhouse right on the Dorfplatz, the museum opens Sunday afternoons with free admission, and from its south-facing windows the Alpstein mountain panorama frames the visit. It is an easy, low-commitment stop that rewards anyone curious about Appenzell village life, old printmaking and local art.