2024 - Lost places are a specialty in Zurich

A strange kind of hobby: visiting empty houses and documenting their decay with pleasant shivers. On the way with two explorers of so-called Lost Places.

A strange building stands high up in Küsnacht, in the Itschnach district of the village. It doesn’t really fit here in the villa district, where the gardens of some properties are as big as soccer fields and the view is of Lake Zurich. A sign shows the way. “Clinic St. Raphael” is written on it. There is also a sign at the parking lot 50 meters away: “Only for St. Raphael Clinic”. As if patients and employees would still park here.

The private clinic has been closed since 2008. If she ever had the luster of wealth and exclusivity, that has long since faded. Most of the windows have been smashed, the facades have been sprayed with spray, ivy and blackberry bushes are creeping inside, half-heartedly covered construction machines are standing around in front of the main entrance.

To call the building complex at the edge of the forest run down is putting it kindly. But that is exactly why the old clinic has a special appeal.

On this January morning, just as it is getting light, a dark minibus pulls into the parking lot. A man and a woman in construction worker’s clothing get out: sturdy shoes and trousers, fleece jacket, thick gloves. Both carry backpacks with photo material. You are here to explore the clinic.

Michaela Zürrer and Claudio Merki* call themselves Urban Explorers: a worldwide movement of people who visit abandoned buildings and areas in their free time. So-called Lost Places, forgotten places. They document their visits with photos and post them on social networks or their own websites. They want to remain anonymous because their hobby is on the borderline of legality.

The former St. Raphael Clinic is such a forgotten place. The area is surrounded by a barrier. Merki puts her finger to her mouth. Nobody should be aware of this visit. Anyone who enters private property without authorization can be reported by the owner for trespassing. “If someone comes and asks what we’re doing here, I answer: take pictures,” says Merki. “And that’s true.” The police had already turned up, and then of course the area was immediately left again.

The St. Raphael Clinic is located in the Küsnacht district of Itschnach, in the middle of the residential area.

It's dark inside the clinic - the Urban Explorers are walking through the spray-covered corridors with flashlights. — It’s dark inside the clinic – the Urban Explorers are walking through the spray-covered corridors with flashlights.

You can get inside through broken windows. It’s dark, the two turn on their flashlights to be able to see anything at all. Now another world opens up. The St. Raphael Clinic was once a hospital with around thirty beds and three operating rooms, opened in the 1960s. You have to search for the past for a long time here. Almost all of the walls are covered in graffiti, broken glass and rubbish lie on the floor.

Urban explorers or “urbexers” like Claudio Merki and Michaela Zürrer are looking for remnants of the past. They prefer places that look as if they have just been abandoned.

In this regard, the old clinic is a disappointment. “But there were vandals at work, not urbexers,” says Zürrer. Because they have a code of honor when they visit a forgotten place: don’t leave any traces, don’t break anything or take anything with you. She herself only explores buildings that she does not have to force her way into.

“I know it sounds paradoxical because we’re entering someone else’s property here,” she says, “but I want to show my appreciation for this building and its history. Patients were cared for here, people worked, earned their living and thus fed their families.»

A silent community

Zürrer is a young woman in her twenties with brightly colored hair and a friendly face. As a child, she was drawn to castle ruins, she says. Then, in her teens, she spotted an article about it Sanatorio del Gottardo in northern Ticino above Quinto: a former hospital that opened in 1905.

Until the early 1960s, the Sanatorio was run as a clinic for tuberculosis patients, since then it has been empty. “The article said the Sanatorio was the scariest place in Switzerland,” says Zürrer. “I had to go there.”

The Sanatorio, which looks like a haunted house and would be ideal as a backdrop for a horror film, is Switzerland’s most famous lost place. Zürrer still remembers her first visit clearly. “I was terrified because I had heard that occult practices were being practiced here,” she says, laughing. But the fascination prevailed.

Zürrer researched on the Internet and found that there is a community of Urban Explorers in Switzerland that consists of up to 1000 people. She was excited – and sobered at the same time. “Most urbexers don’t want to reveal the location of their photo subjects.” Those who inquire are usually turned away rather harshly.

So Zürrer decided to set up his own website with a database of abandoned places. Unlike other platforms, it publishes the locations of old houses, factories or restaurants. At the beginning she was attacked from the scene because of this. “I even got death threats.” Zurrer doesn’t understand that. «My experience is not worth less because I share it.» Claudio Merki, whom she met on another platform, sees it that way too. The two often go exploring together.

In the old clinic it seems as if there is hardly anything left to discover. But then a corridor opens, in which lies an overturned piano. A few meters away is a small blue pram. “One wonders how something like this found its way here,” says Merki. In one room, it must have been a former patient’s room, there is a wooden bed frame, the slatted frame is cracked.

Yellowed newspaper pages lie on the floor in front of the door, an NZZ from 1982. The cupboards and racks in the corridor are all empty. Zürrer had hoped for old documents. “You wouldn’t believe what people leave behind.” Patient sheets, for example.