3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim and by record the earliest date in Switzerland on this list belongs to the same house: the Taverne zur Krone at Dietikon, where the city's own history of the building and German Wikipedia both put the first mention of a taverne in 1259, when it belonged to Wettingen Abbey. The charter behind that year has not been read here, and the Krone's page says so. The house whose record runs ahead of its own claim is the Kindli in Zürich, which dates itself to 1474 while a landlord was selling wine in it in 1409.
Switzerland dates its drinking houses through licences and through architecture, and almost never through either one directly. A Taverne was not a shop sign but a grade of permission: it allowed food as well as drink, beds for travellers and a painted sign over the door, which is why the earliest Swiss date on this page records a right granted to a house rather than the day somebody was first served. A Keller is the other institution here, the vaulted cellar tavern reached by a hatch and a flight of steps from the street, and Bern is where they mattered most — the city's architectural history counts the one under the Gerechtigkeitsgasse as the last of more than two hundred. The third house is a Gasthaus in the Zürich old town, a lodging house with a drinking room in it. Two habits of the country shape what can be proved. The first is that Switzerland writes its buildings up thoroughly and its licences hardly at all: the dates here come from the cantonal and municipal art-monuments volumes, through protection orders and encyclopedia articles that follow them, and not one of them is a lease or a tavern right we have read. The second is that a Swiss house is often rebuilt by the community that owns it, which preserves the walls and interrupts the trade.
Taverne zur Krone is the one with the licence behind it. It stands on the square it named, on the old road between Zürich and Baden, and its second house of 1595 had twenty-five beds, a barn, a store room and a kitchen garden with pigsties, which is the inventory of a working stop for carters and the mail coach rather than of a village bar. Kindli is at the south foot of the Lindenhof in Zürich, and it has the best-told single night on this page: the Halle pilgrim Hans von Waltheym lodged there at Whitsun 1474 and wrote up the house and its host Albrecht Moser in what is counted among the earliest printed descriptions of a Swiss inn. Its painted inn sign of 1557 is now in the Swiss National Museum, and the red lettering across the front, which announces the house as a Gasthaus in the fifteen hundreds, went up only in 1928. Klötzlikeller is the plainest and the hardest to date: a vault under the Gerechtigkeitsgasse where 1635 is painted over the door and the street’s architectural history says 1632.
The cantonal order that protected the Krone on 3 November 1982 calls the group of tavern buildings exceptionally important, and the Kindli is protected as a cultural property by the city of Zürich. Both are worth having and neither is a licence. A protection order describes fabric — what survives, what was altered, what is worth keeping — so it can tell you that a portal is of 1703 and say nothing at all about who was pouring behind it. That gap is why the Krone’s page carries an open question rather than a citation: the 1259 reaches us through the city’s 2010 book about the house and the encyclopedia article that follows it, and nobody has put the abbey’s charter in front of us. The Bern case is smaller and more instructive. Three years separate the house’s 1635 from the art-monuments volumes’ 1632, which changes nothing about the age of the cellar and everything about which number a reader should trust, so both are printed. If you want the order in which those tests are worth applying, it is set out in how historians date an old pub; the licence grades behind the word taverne are in inn, tavern or alehouse.
The Krone is the clearest example on this site of a house saved by its town rather than by a brewery. Dietikon bought it in 2005, had the rooms rebuilt to Tilla Theus’s design and opened them again on 19 April 2010, and the result is a genuinely old tavern in which very little is old to the touch. That is a Swiss pattern rather than a Swiss failing, and it cuts both ways: the fabric survives and the run of trade does not. The Kindli lost two and a half centuries of it to one wealthy family’s decision to live in the house, and the Klötzlikeller is the last of Bern’s cellars precisely because the other two hundred were put to other uses.
Three houses is thin for a country of this age, and the gap is ours rather than Switzerland’s: all three are in the German-speaking cantons, and the French- and Italian-speaking ones are unworked here. For the nearest comparison, a German-speaking country where the brewery tap and the Gasthaus tell a similar story, see the oldest pubs in Germany and Austria. For how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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Dietikon, Zürich
The house and German Wikipedia, which cites the city of Dietikon's 2010 history of the building, both put the first mention of a taverne here in 1259, when it belonged to Wettingen Abbey. A second publisher has now read the charter and describes it differently. Karl Grunder, writing on the Krone in the Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich for 2007, dates it 17 October 1259 and says it is the deed
Zürich, Switzerland
German Wikipedia's account of the house, which follows the Zurich art monuments volumes and a 2019 book written about it, records a drinking room here from 1357 on the authority of the nineteenth-century Zurich pastor Salomon Vögelin, and a firmer date in 1409, when the landlord Heinrich Hagnauer sold wine in the house called ze dem Kind. The house itself claims 1474, the Whitsun week when the Halle pilgrim Hans von
Bern, Switzerland
The house prints 1635 over its own door; German Wikipedia's account of the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, which follows the Bern art monuments volumes and the Swiss art guide, says the cellar tavern at number 62 was founded in 1632 and is the last of the more than two hundred cellar taverns Bern once had. Three years is well inside a generation, so the founding date stands either way, but the two numbers disagree and the
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