Abstract Over the last decade the number of regional to global scale studies of river chemical fluxes and their steering factors increased rapidly, entailing a growing demand for appropriate databases to calculate mass budgets, to calibrate models, or to test hypotheses. We present a short overview of the recently established GLObal RIver CHemistry database GLORICH, which combines an assemblage of hydrochemical data from varying sources with catchment characteristics of the sampling locations. The information provided include e.g. catchment size, lithology, soil, climate, land cover, net primary production, population density and average slope gradient. The data base comprises 1.27 million samples distributed over 17,000 sampling locations.