Lugano becomes the third financial centre

A resort town turns into a banking city

In the middle of the 1960s Lugano was a town of about 25,000 inhabitants.¹ Its economy had rested since the opening of the Gotthard railway on tourism, trade and the services of a regional capital (Chapter C.III). The hotels on the lakefront, the funiculars of Monte Brè and San Salvatore and the villas of Castagnola and Paradiso were the visible signs of that economy. Within two decades banking became the town's leading industry. The Ticino tourism organization's own retrospective of the 1970s records that the banks of Lugano and of the border zone received large inflows of capital, that Swiss stability and tradition attracted international interest, and that the tertiary sector expanded and drove economic and social development.² The Ticino bankers' association places the international rise of the Lugano financial centre in the 1960s and 1970s and describes Lugano as the third Swiss financial centre after Zurich and Geneva.³

The title "third financial centre" has no legal meaning. It expresses a common assessment, which the Ticino bankers' association repeats today when it describes Lugano as the third Swiss financial centre after Zurich and Geneva, and which rests loosely on the number of banks, banking employment and assets under management.⁴ What distinguished Lugano from the other two was the concentration on one foreign market. Zurich served the world and the Swiss economy, Geneva served France, the Middle East and the international organizations (as the Geneva volume describes), while Lugano served Italy, and above all Lombardy. Its bankers spoke the client's language, read the client's newspapers and understood the political and fiscal anxieties that brought him across the border. The same concentration made Lugano dependent on Italian policy, as the amnesties and the exchange of information after 2001 were to show (Chapter E.II).

Land, buildings and the city

The new wealth changed the city physically. Because banks needed offices, many old hotels and villas of the lakefront and the centre gave way to office buildings. The construction boom of the 1960s and early 1970s extended the town along the lake and up the slopes of the surrounding hills. In 1972 Lugano merged with the neighbouring municipalities of Brè-Aldesago and Castagnola, the first of three waves of aggregation that by 2013 had made it a city of about 68,000 inhabitants on an area of almost 76 square kilometres.⁵ The architecture of the banking city came later. The most prominent bank buildings, such as the headquarters of the Banca del Gottardo designed by Mario Botta, belong to the 1980s and were the monuments of a business built in the preceding decades.⁶ Italian money also flowed into real estate. Holiday homes and apartments on the lakes of Lugano and Maggiore were a classic investment for Italian families, who could combine the use of a house with the security of a Swiss asset. Foreign purchases of land drove up prices and provoked political resistance throughout Switzerland. Between 1961 and 1980 the federal authorities granted 57,678 authorizations to foreigners to acquire land, for a total of 5,809 hectares and a value of about CHF 13 billion.⁷ Ticino, as a canton of tourism and second homes, was among the regions most affected and also among those that most resisted federal restrictions. When a popular initiative against the "sell-out of the homeland" was put to the vote on 20 May 1984 and obtained 48.9 per cent nationally, Ticino voted against it together with the French-speaking cantons and the tourist regions.⁸ The federal restrictions themselves are discussed in the next section.

Notes

1. Berbenni (as above), 330 ("una cittadina di 25.000 abitanti", for 1965). ↩
2. Ticino Turismo, "Il Ticino degli anni 70", https://www.ticino.ch/en/about-us/ett-storico/anni-70.html ("Le banche di Lugano e anche quelle della zona di frontiera incontrano i flussi di cospicui capitali in entrata"). ↩
3. Associazione Bancaria Ticinese, "Cenni storici" (as above). ↩
4. Associazione Bancaria Ticinese, "Cenni storici", https://www.abti.ch/piazza-finanziaria/cenni-storici/ ("Lugano è oggi quotata come la terza piazza finanziaria svizzera, dopo Zurigo e Ginevra"; development "negli anni Sessanta e Settanta"). For the underlying figures see René Chopard, Il sistema bancario ticinese e la piazza finanziaria svizzera (as above). ↩
5. Città di Lugano, "Storia", https://www.lugano.ch/la-mia-citta/identita-e-storia/storia/ (aggregations of 1972 with Brè-Aldesago and Castagnola, 2004 and 2008–2013; 75.81 km² and about 68,000 inhabitants; "fra le dieci maggiori città svizzere"). ↩
6. Wikipedia (Italian), "Banca del Gottardo" (as above) (new headquarters by Mario Botta in the 1980s). Used as a last resort. ↩
7. Leonhard Neidhart, "Svendita del territorio", in DSS, version of 29 January 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/017357/. ↩
8. Neidhart, "Svendita del territorio" (as above) (vote of 20 May 1984, 48.9 per cent yes; rejected by the French-speaking cantons, Ticino and the tourist regions). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.