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The World's Largest Chocolate Fountain Debuts in Switzerland | Frommer's Lindt Home of Chocolate

The World's Largest Chocolate Fountain Debuts in Switzerland

Who says nothing good has happened in 2020?

Ok, that would be us—over and over and over.

But now we have an exception: Swiss chocolate manufacturer Lindt & Sprüngli, which has been in business since 1845, just opened the Lindt Home of Chocolate, a lollapalooza of a new museum in Zürich. The candy giant poured some US$108 million into the facility, which took more than three years to create. Everything in the place is supersized.

The chocolate fountain, pictured above, is massive yet elegant. It contains 1,500 liters (396 gallons) of melted chocolate, stands 9 meters (30 feet) tall, and involves an assortment of 308 pipes. But that's not all: The onsite chocolate shop, pictured below, is the largest on the planet at 1,640 square feet—bigger than some people's houses.

The curators of the attraction, which is near the banks of Lake Zürich just south of central Zürich, hope to offer visitors something I assumed, for no good reason, that I already had: "chocolate competence."

No, that doesn’t mean the ability to devour two pints of chocolate ice cream in just one sitting (another mistake on my part). It means understanding the history of the famed bean, how it ripens, and how the resulting candies and cocoas are manufactured. To that end, there are exhibits on all of these topics, plus candy-making classes.

Lindt expects to welcome 350,000 visitors a year, which would have seemed easily doable before the pandemic. Let’s hope the museum, which opened in September with Covid-19 safety measures in place, can achieve all of its sweet goals.

The Lindt facility joins all the other dreamy cocoa peddlers that Frommer's profiled in our recent feature about the great chocolatiers of Zürich.

The Lindt Home of Chocolate is at Schokoladenplatz 1 in Kilchberg, an area of Zürich. Adult tickets are CHF$15 (US$16), $10 (US$11) for kids ages 8–15, and free for kids under 8. Reservations are required and can be made at www.lindt-home-of-chocolate.com.

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