  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 Schr\"odinger equation with a
semirelativistic Hamiltonian. The theoretical predictions are found in close
agreement with experiment.
