Vaduz Rathaus, a bold bet placed in the depths of 1931

Vaduz Town Hall doesn’t feature on many sightseeing lists, and I can see why. There’s no museum and you can’t tour the inside. But I love its story, because it tells how a village with no money decided to give itself a proper seat in the very hardest years, and its façade holds the best reminder of winegrowing Vaduz anywhere in the centre.

A building that cost three times what was in the kitty

The tourist board’s page tells it in detail. In 1931 Vaduz was in poor economic shape, yet on 17 November that year the town meeting approved a new town hall, with premises for a bank, opposite the Gasthof «Engel». The budget ran to CHF 350,000, nearly three times the municipality’s income. The driving force was Mayor Ludwig Ospelt, the first to have his office in the building.

Plenty of architects wanted the job, but on 29 January 1932 Franz Roeckle showed his plans to the council and was hired the same day. Work moved fast and the Rathaus opened on 19 November 1933. Roeckle worked mainly in Stuttgart and Frankfurt, and the Historical Lexicon counts him among the early modernists in Frankfurt, with buildings such as the Westend synagogue.

The winegrowers’ balcony

What I’d take time over is the south front. Johannes Troyer’s balcony fresco shows St Urban, the pope who is patron saint of winegrowers. On the front of the balustrade are a male and a female winegrower, with ears of wheat and maize on the sides. It’s a curious thing to find the farming village painted onto the most official building in town, and I think it’s the best summary of Vaduz on the Städtle. Troyer, incidentally, designed 74 of the country’s stamps, a link to the hobby I cover in the guide to Liechtenstein stamps. For the wine side of things, see my guide to Liechtenstein wine.

At the entrance is the municipal crest, carved in stone by Engelbert Ospelt. It’s the 1978 design, quartered with a red princely hat on silver and a silver church banner on red, the banner recalling the counts of Werdenberg-Sargans, who in 1342 laid the foundations of the country. Vaduz was also the first municipality in Liechtenstein to get a coat of arms, in 1932. With it came the right to its own flag, split horizontally with a red and white upper half and a red lower half, and in 1978 it was kept unchanged. If you spot a flag like that in Vaduz, it belongs to the town, not the country.

From bank and post office to town office

For half a century the building was a bit of everything. Besides the mayor’s office, council and administration, it housed the Bank in Liechtenstein, the Landesbank, the post office and several local societies. It was altered several times, and the big renovation of 1984, under Mayor Arthur Konrad, left it for council use alone. Today it’s a working office, so I’d admire it from outside. Ludwig Ospelt, the mayor who pushed it through, served from 1930 to 1933 and again from 1936 to 1942, and was the first to sit in the building he’d fought for. I like that the man who took the gamble got to use it.

The square where half of Vaduz begins

The town hall square is the way in for a lot of visitors. A coach terminal has stood beside it since 1998, and as the Lexicon points out, most people who visit Vaduz come for the day only. The Vaduz Citytrain has its stop right there, with a ticket desk run jointly with the tourist board, and between 1 April and 31 October it leaves at 13:00 and 16:30.

The square is covered and keeps a calendar of its own. In 2026 it hosted the Genussfestival from 5 to 13 September. I’d check the Liechtenstein events calendar before going, because a festival day changes the atmosphere entirely.

Fitting it into your walk

Arrive by coach, or by bus to Vaduz, Städtle, and you’ll start here. I’d reverse that, entering from the south through the government quarter and ending the walk along the Städtle in Vaduz outside the town hall, in time to board the Citytrain or carry on walking to the Mitteldorf vineyards, which begin a little further north.