We present a chiral constituent quark model for light and strange baryons providing a unified description of their ground states and excitation spectra. The model relies on constituent quarks and Goldstone bosons arising as effective degrees of freedom of low-energy QCD from the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. The spectra of the three-quark systems are obtained from a precise variational solution of the Schro¨dinger equation with a semirelativistic Hamiltonian. The theoretical predictions are found in close agreement with experiment. ©1998 American Institute of Physics.