Schaan's Roman fort and the chapel built on its walls

Most people link Liechtenstein with a princely castle and some banks. What caught me out, reading up on Schaan, is that the country has the remains of a 4th-century Roman army camp in the middle of a town, with a chapel leaning on its walls. Here’s how I’d see it so it amounts to more than a few stones.

An imperial barracks on the road to Italy

The fort stands in the centre of Schaan, beside St Petersplatz, at 455 m. The Historisches Lexikon says it was known from 1847, Ferdinand Keller published the first plan in 1864 and David Beck led the systematic dig between 1956 and 1958. The plan is almost square, about 57 by 60 metres, with four towers jutting out at the corners.

For such a compact site the numbers are striking. The towers measured 4 by 4 metres inside and stood about 10 metres tall, and the walls were 3.60 m thick and 6 to 8 m high. You entered through a tower in the middle of the north side, with two gates roughly three metres wide. Inside were barracks either side of the gate, a granary against the south wall and a bath suite with underfloor heating and warm, hot and cold rooms.

Why did Rome want a fort in Schaan?

Look at a map. Schaan sits on the road that linked Milan with Augsburg, and the Lexikon explains that the fort watched over it and acted as a rear base for the fortified Rhine, Danube and Iller frontier built under Valentinian I after AD 364. In a crisis it also gave shelter to people in the valley.

The coins and finds date it to the second half of the 4th century. Schaan council adds that there was a Roman presence in the village from the 1st century and that the fort burnt down in the first half of the 5th. Its life was short, but it left something that has lasted.

St Peter’s, sitting on the wall

That something is the church. The Lexikon says that in the 5th century a small church with a baptistery was built inside the walls, between the gate tower and the north-east tower, and the council links it to a Christian community that probably existed by the 5th or 6th century. The St Peter’s chapel you see today stands partly on the fort’s walls and is recorded as a church in 1298.

The present building is a later story. It goes back to a late Gothic rebuild of the later 1400s, was damaged in the village fire of 1849 and was reworked between 1961 and 1963 with a new bell tower. The Lexikon says its vaulted nave is the only one from that period left in the country, and wall paintings from several centuries came to light in 1995. The sources disagree on whether it’s Liechtenstein’s oldest church, so I’d put it among the oldest, alongside St Mamertus chapel in Triesen. The others are side by side in my overview of churches and chapels in Liechtenstein.

The ground under Schaan is still talking

What I like most is that the story isn’t closed. In September and October 2024, a rescue excavation at Obergass 46, just 180 metres from St Peter’s, uncovered seven graves from the 7th to 9th centuries, with traces of wooden coffins, plus Roman-era rubbish pits holding a coin of Constantine from the early 4th century. The council says the analysis is ongoing.

Finds from the older digs, coins, fine tableware, lamps, bone combs and soapstone vessels, aren’t kept on the square. If you want to see them in a case, I’d go to the National Museum of Liechtenstein on the Städtle in Vaduz.

How I’d see it

The fort is station 2 of Schaan’s Kulturweg and St Peter’s is station 3, so it makes sense to start the walk here. I’ve seen neither a price nor opening hours for the site on any official website, and I haven’t found opening times for the chapel interior either. I’d go in daylight, read the panel and walk round the chapel looking for the line of the wall.

If you’re walking, stage 3 of the Liechtenstein Trail, Vaduz to Nendeln, passes Schaan’s Roman ruins before climbing to the Dux tower. If you’re on the bus, it’s five minutes on foot from the centre of Schaan.