Various aspects of chiral models are discussed with special emphasis on the chiral quark model and the Skyrme model. Firstly, the ability of the chiral quark model to reproduce pion scattering data is reviewed. Secondly the soliton sector of the model is studied. The soliton solution is interpreted as a baryon — nucleon or dilambda. Next, on the example of the Skyrme, model we study inclusion of strangeness, large limit and quantization. It is argued that effective chiral models qualitatively reproduce the low energy limit of QCD.