Einsiedeln Abbey

Why go

The abbey describes itself as a Benedictine abbey that is home to around forty monks, a place of pilgrimage and a place of culture and education, and its pages say the abbey church was planned by Brother Kaspar Moosbrugger and decorated by the Asam brothers between 1719 and 1735. The Chapel of Grace inside the church, rebuilt in 1817 after French troops destroyed it in 1798, holds a 15th-century statue of the Black Madonna. The abbey says it is not a museum and only a few of its rooms can be visited; tours of the abbey church and the abbey library, which it dates to 934, are given by the monks for groups by arrangement and by guides of the Tourist Office Einsiedeln, whose tours need no advance booking, while individual visitors are referred to the Tourist Office. The abbey says the services the monks celebrate are public. Zürich Tourism gives different days and times for tours and the sung Salve Regina, so no schedule is stated. This record is the monastery with its church, not the Territorial Abbey of Einsiedeln (an ecclesiastical jurisdiction), and Zurich is a base for it, not its container.