Of Cherries & Crypto

A tiny Swiss canton you've probably never thought about quietly became the richest place in the country. This is its portrait, drawn from the inside.

Zug is smaller than your city and was once one of Switzerland's poorest corners. Today, it has the lowest corporate taxes in the land, more millionaires packed together than anywhere else, and a nickname the tech world knows well: Crypto Valley. It is also home to cherry orchards six centuries old, the commodity-trading giant Glencore, and an encryption company whose Cold War secret the world only uncovered in 2020.

Luca Ecari arrived from Rome in 2006, meaning to stay a few years. Almost twenty years later, a Swiss citizen who has lived in three of the canton's eleven communes, he set out to capture the whole strange, quiet, contradictory place in a single portrait.

Of Cherries & Crypto is not a guidebook and not a history textbook. It is one insider's 360-degree view: the lake and the mountains, the eleven communes, the Catholic calendar the money never rescheduled, the spies and the traders and the blockchain founders, the 1887 night the lakefront slid into the lake, and the housing squeeze that success has brought. Affectionate, honest, occasionally critical, and carefully sourced.

If you live in Switzerland, are thinking of moving, do business here, or are simply curious how somewhere so small ended up mattering so much, this is the Zug you won't find on a postcard.

The third volume of the Switzerland Insider Series.