Geneva Audio Tours

Geneva has no sister cities. When asked why, city officials explain that Geneva considers itself related to the entire world. This is not false modesty -- it is a city where the United Nations maintains its European headquarters, where the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in 1863 and still operates from a building near the lake, where the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, and over two hundred other international bodies keep offices. More international organizations are headquartered here than in any other city on the planet. Forty-eight percent of the population are foreign nationals. The city conducts daily life in French but conducts global diplomacy in everything.

For all that international weight, the city itself is surprisingly intimate.

It is small -- the commune covers only 16 square kilometers -- and the Old Town on the left bank climbs steeply from the lake shore in a tangle of medieval streets. St. Pierre Cathedral, where John Calvin preached after arriving in 1536, still stands at the top of the hill and still draws visitors who want to sit in the spot where the Reformation shaped European history. Calvin's Geneva was sometimes called the Protestant Rome, a city of severe moral governance and international theological influence. Today the cathedral is mostly empty on Sundays and the city has secularized dramatically: over half the population identifies as non-religious.