Site archéologique de la Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Genève — Local services in Geneva

This review is solely based on one employee and it is therefore with mixed feelings that I am giving a one star review, but nevertheless it is representative of our experience at the archeological site.

We bought tickets for the tower and the archeological site inside the cathedral itself. First of all we visited the towers and it was wonderful! Highly recommend this!

Afterwards we visited the basement and the archeological site. We saw an employee sitting at the desk at the entrance. He was looking at a computer. We walked up to the desk and waited 20/30 seconds. As he did not turn to us we assumed that maybe we were just supposed to walk in as we already had the tickets.

We entered the exhibition, but quickly noticed that a large part of the exhibition revolves around an audio guide. Since we did not get an audio guide from the front desk and since we had already entered the exhibition, we calmly tried to reach contact to the front desk employee, to ask if it was safe to exit again to get the audio guides.

Before we even got the chance to ask, he interrupted shouting “I’m sitting right here! If you stop (at the desk) I give (the audioguide), if you go, I don’t”.

We were startled at the harsh response and we remained silent and stunned, until some other guests quietly remarked that they too forgot to ask for the guides. One of these guests took the chance and exited the exhibit to get the audio guide and she was met with the same behavior from the employee asking “why didn’t you stop!?”

After seeing that she could enter again with the same ticket, my girlfriend and I also went back to the desk, where we were met with a harsh tone from the employee saying “you could just stop and say hi! It is not that difficult! Here is the audio guide. Goodbye!”. I kept a calm tone as I refuse to go to such a low level of communication and apologizing numerous times (for walking past him?) calmly saying “have a good day”.

When we walked back into the exhibition, we noticed that he had only given us one audio guide, even though we were clearly two people.

After this I calmly walked up and laid the audio guide on the desk. Since I did not want to try to convince him to give us another.

I will honestly say that this experience ruined our day because we feel like we were treated very unfairly.

I don’t know if he took his personal problems to work, or some previous visitors had treated him badly, but regardless this was very unprofessional.

For reference this happened July 9th 2023 at...

One of amazing place in Geneva. The whole museum is completely under the cathedral that is really amazing. In here we can see the old culture of Geneva there technology used in building. Well , tombs the storage rooms , etc etc . One of the main place is the room bishop it is really beautiful just looking at the room we can understand that the how much power has bishop over Geneva city on that time . The ground declaration is really amazing most of part were destroyed but they well preserved it in great way the room represent the political power of bishop also the has a heating system in the 4 th century . For entry it's 4 euro or Swiss franc for students and 8 euro or Swiss franc for the adults I don't know how much for the children (IAM sorry 🙂) it's really worth...

Highly recommend spending the time to look around. Be aware if you have mobility issues as there are stairs involved. The audio guide is included and there is a bathroom. The site is well curated with lots of information. I ended up spending almost two hours here because of how interesting it was! If you or someone you love has any interest in history, early church, Rome, etc...