Ruggell, Liechtenstein's flat north

Ruggell is horizontal Liechtenstein. While the south clambers up the mountains, this village at the country’s northern tip spreads across the Rhine plain, between the river, a vast fen and the foot of the Eschnerberg. The upshot is a place you can cycle round without effort, with the Swiss border on one side and the Austrian one on the other.

The cycling village

The municipal website presents Ruggell as Liechtenstein’s cycling village, because it’s the only municipality that’s almost completely flat. It even prints a dialect slogan on the bike bags it hands out, saying roughly that what people in Ruggell like best is cycling from morning till night. The Historisches Lexikon adds the geography, Ruggell is the only village in the country that lies entirely on the Rhine’s floodplain.

It has had a LIEbike station since 2022, and if you bring your own bike you can link up with the valley routes. The country’s cycling options are gathered on cycling in Liechtenstein.

What is there to see in Ruggell?

First, the Ruggeller Riet. It’s a 90.86-hectare fen north of the village, protected since 1978, and the Office of Statistics lists it as the lowest point in the country, at 430 metres. The municipality recommends coming in May, when the irises flower. It has so much natural and human history that I’ve given it a page of its own, the Ruggeller Riet.

Second, the Küefer-Martis-Huus, a listed house from 1730 that the village opened in September 2002 as a cultural centre and museum devoted mainly to water, which makes sense for a place that always lived with one eye on the Rhine. It opens Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 14:00 to 17:00, or by appointment, and runs temporary exhibitions. Until 25 October 2026 it shows work by Maggy Mauritz, and from 22 November to 14 March 2027 a series of photographs by Peter Klaunzer. There’s more detail on the Küefer-Martis-Huus.

St Fridolin’s church is neo-Gothic, from 1897-1903, designed by Gustav Ritter von Neumann, the Viennese architect of the Government Building in Vaduz. Prince Johann II paid 60% of the cost and donated the Gothic winged altarpiece in the baptism chapel, with figures from around 1490. A chapel to the same saint stood here from 1614, and Ruggell only became a parish in its own right in 1874.

A village that lived by the river, and against it

The name comes from the Romansh runcaglia, a clearing, land won from the forest, and the first certain record is from 1347 as «Runggælle». For centuries Ruggell had a ferry across to Salez in Switzerland, a customs post and cattle and horse markets. The ferry stopped in 1918, and the Lexikon says it was the last on Liechtenstein’s stretch of the river. The village’s isolation eased with the Rhine bridge of 1929.

The borders still shape the map. To the west lies the Swiss canton of St Gallen, and to the north Austria’s Vorarlberg, which the Lexikon describes as an EU external border. How to cross each is on Liechtenstein’s borders and customs.

Ruggell also features in the country’s most novel-like 20th-century episode. In May 1945, when what was left of a Russian army that had fought alongside the Wehrmacht crossed the border at Hinterschellenberg, the soldiers spent their first nights in the school buildings of the two northern villages, and the national archive holds a photo of the priest and government councillor Anton Frommelt addressing the internees in the Ruggell camp, with locals watching over the fence.

A village of young families, with a new quarter

Ruggell has grown a lot and it shows. In September 2018 it became the first municipality in the country to receive UNICEF’s child-friendly label, renewed in 2022, and it has ten playgrounds spread around its neighbourhoods. In its business district, well connected to the motorway, the municipal website describes a new quarter with hotels, restaurants, bars and a gym with a spa. Next to it is the Freizeitpark Widau, with football pitches, beach volleyball, an exercise park and a barbecue spot.

Getting there and the Liechtenstein Trail

By bus, routes 31 and 32 come from Eschen, route 36 from Vaduz, Schaan and Bendern, and route 37 crosses to Sennwald. The Liechtenstein Trail ends its fourth stage here, arriving from Nendeln via the Grossabünt bathing lake, and starts its fifth, which leaves the Küefer-Martis-Huus for the Riet and the ruins of Schellenberg.