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Abstract The prospect of realizing highly entangled states on quantum processors with fundamentally different hardware geometries raises the question: to what extent does a state of a quantum spin system have an intrinsic geometry? In this paper, we propose that both states and dynamics of a spin system have a canonically associatedcoarse geometry, in the sense of Roe, on the set of sites in the thermodynamic limit. For a state$$\phi $$ $\varphi$on an (abstract) spin system with an infinite collection of sitesX, we define a universal coarse structure$$\mathcal {E}_{\phi }$$ $E_{\varphi }$on the setXwith the property that a state has decay of correlations with respect to a coarse structure$$\mathcal {E}$$ $E$onXif and only if$$\mathcal {E}_{\phi }\subseteq \mathcal {E}$$ $E_{\varphi }\subseteq E$. We show that under mild assumptions, the coarsely connected completion$$(\mathcal {E}_{\phi })_{con}$$ ${\left(E_{\varphi }\right)}_{\mathrm{con}}$is stable under quasi-local perturbations of the state$$\phi $$ $\varphi$. We also develop in parallel a dynamical coarse structure for arbitrary quantum channels, and prove a similar stability result. We show that several order parameters of a state only depend on the coarse structure of an underlying spatial metric, and we establish a basic compatibility between the dynamical coarse structure associated with a quantum circuit$$\alpha $$ $\alpha$and the coarse structure of the state$$\psi \circ \alpha $$ $\psi \circ \alpha$where$$\psi $$ $\psi$is any product state.