Facts about Switzerland
Capital Bern · Europe
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Switzerland is a landlocked federation of 26 cantons with four official languages and a tradition of direct democracy that puts major decisions to referendum several times a year. Neutral since 1815 and still outside the European Union, it has built one of the wealthiest economies in the world on finance, pharmaceuticals and precision manufacturing.
The country divides into three bands. The Alps cover about 60 percent of the territory across the south and center, rising to the Dufourspitze at 4,634 meters and holding the glaciers that feed the Rhine, the Rhône and the Inn. The Jura range runs along the French border in the northwest. Between them lies the Mittelland, a rolling central plateau that occupies less than a third of the land yet carries roughly two thirds of the population along with most of the farming and industry.
Zurich is the largest city and the financial center, Geneva at the far end of its lake hosts the United Nations and dozens of international organizations, Basel on the Rhine holds the pharmaceutical industry, and Bern is the modest federal city that serves as capital. Lausanne, Lucerne and Lugano anchor the French, central and Italian-speaking regions. Visitors come overwhelmingly for the mountains, whether the Matterhorn above Zermatt, the Jungfrau region or the lakes at Lucerne and Geneva, and the density of the rail network makes reaching them unusually easy.
- Population
- 9 million
- Area
- 41,285 km²
- Currency
- Swiss franc (CHF)
- Official languages
- German, French, Italian, Romansh
- Cantons
- 26
- Highest point
- Dufourspitze, 4,634 m
The Switzerland course
Geography of Switzerland
Alps, Jura and the plateau between them, where two thirds of the country actually lives.
History of Switzerland
A confederation dated to 1291, a federal state since 1848, and neutral since the Congress of Vienna.
Language of Switzerland
Four official languages, and a spoken German that German broadcasters sometimes subtitle.
Culture of Switzerland
A national identity built on institutions rather than ethnicity, holding four languages together.
Economy of Switzerland
Pharmaceuticals, banking and watches, with more patents filed per person than almost anywhere.
Politics of Switzerland
Direct democracy three or four times a year, and a seven-member executive whose president rotates annually.
Nature & Wildlife of Switzerland
Ibex rebuilt from a single surviving Italian herd, and glaciers losing volume fast.
Food & Cuisine of Switzerland
Melted cheese in two national forms, and the two inventions that made modern chocolate.
Landmarks of Switzerland
A pyramid peak that killed four of the first party to descend it, and a railway station at 3,454 meters.
People & Society of Switzerland
Nine million people, a quarter of them foreign nationals, mostly packed onto the plateau.
Geography of Switzerland
Switzerland is landlocked and divides into three regions: the Alps across the south and center covering about 60 percent of the land, the Jura along the northwestern border with France, and the Mittelland plateau in between. That middle band is less than a third of the territory but holds around two thirds of the population and nearly all the large cities.
The Dufourspitze in the Monte Rosa massif is the highest point at 4,634 meters, though the Matterhorn is the more famous peak. Alpine watersheds send the Rhine north to the North Sea, the Rhône west to the Mediterranean and the Inn east toward the Black Sea, which makes the country a water tower for much of Europe. Its glaciers have lost a substantial share of their volume since 2000 and continue to retreat quickly.
History of Switzerland
The traditional founding is a pact of 1291 between three rural communities in the central Alps, which grew over centuries into a loose confederation that repeatedly defeated larger feudal armies and supplied mercenaries across Europe. The Reformation split the cantons along confessional lines from the 1520s, with Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva.
A brief civil war in 1847 was followed by the 1848 constitution that created the modern federal state, borrowing a bicameral structure from the United States while preserving cantonal autonomy. The European powers had recognized Swiss neutrality at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the country stayed out of both world wars. It joined the United Nations only in 2002 and remains outside the European Union.
Language of Switzerland
Four languages are official: German for about 62 percent of the population, French for around 23 percent, Italian for roughly eight percent, and Romansh, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken by well under one percent in Graubünden. Federal documents appear in the first three, and Romansh is official in dealings with its own speakers.
German-speaking Switzerland lives in diglossia. Swiss German dialects are used for nearly all speech, including on television and in parliament, while standard German is reserved for writing, and the dialects diverge far enough that German broadcasters sometimes subtitle Swiss interviewees. The cultural line between the German and French halves is known jokingly as the Röstigraben, the rösti ditch, after the potato dish eaten on one side of it.
Culture of Switzerland
Because it spans four languages and both major confessions, Switzerland defines itself through political institutions and shared history rather than common ethnicity, an idea Swiss writers call Willensnation, a nation of will. Regional identity runs deep, and the canton usually matters more to people than the country does.
The Red Cross was founded in Geneva in 1863 by Henry Dunant, and its emblem is the Swiss flag with the colors reversed. Alpine traditions including yodelling, alphorns and Schwingen wrestling survive as living practice rather than performance, and militia service means a large share of men keep military training alongside civilian careers.
Economy of Switzerland
Switzerland has one of the highest incomes per person in the world, built on pharmaceuticals through Roche and Novartis in Basel, banking and asset management in Zurich and Geneva, precision engineering, and watchmaking concentrated in the Jura arc. Nestlé, headquartered on Lake Geneva, is among the largest food companies anywhere.
The country files more patents per resident than almost any other and hosts two of the strongest technical universities in Europe in ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne, alongside CERN on the French border. Banking secrecy, long a defining feature, was substantially dismantled after 2009 under international pressure, and the franc functions as a safe-haven currency the central bank has intervened repeatedly to hold down.
Politics of Switzerland
Switzerland is a federal republic of 26 cantons with unusually strong direct democracy. Citizens vote on federal questions three or four times a year, can force a referendum on any new law by collecting 50,000 signatures, and can put their own constitutional amendments to a national vote with 100,000.
The executive is a seven-member Federal Council rather than a single leader, sharing power collectively with the presidency rotating annually as a largely ceremonial role, and the parties in that council have been distributed by an informal power-sharing formula since 1959. Cantons retain wide authority over taxation, education and policing. Women received the vote in federal elections only in 1971.
Nature & Wildlife of Switzerland
The Swiss National Park in Graubünden, founded in 1914, is the oldest in the Alps and is managed as strict wilderness where visitors must stay on marked paths. Alpine ibex were hunted to extinction in Switzerland and reintroduced from the early 1900s using animals descended from a single surviving Italian herd, and the population now runs to tens of thousands.
Chamois, marmots and golden eagles are widespread in the high country, bearded vultures were reintroduced from 1991, and wolves have returned across the Italian and French borders since the mid-1990s, forming packs that remain politically contentious among sheep farmers. Glacier retreat is the dominant environmental story, with Swiss glaciers losing a large share of their volume since the turn of the century.
Food & Cuisine of Switzerland
Cheese anchors the national cooking, most visibly in fondue, where bread is dipped into a communal pot of melted Gruyère and Vacherin, and raclette, where a cut face of cheese is melted and scraped onto potatoes. Both are winter mountain foods that became national symbols.
Swiss makers shaped modern chocolate twice over: Daniel Peter added milk to it in 1875 using Henri Nestlé’s condensed milk, and Rodolphe Lindt invented conching in 1879, which gave chocolate its smooth texture. Rösti, a fried grated potato cake from the German-speaking cantons, is common enough to have named the cultural divide, and Swiss chocolate consumption per person is among the highest in the world.
Landmarks of Switzerland
The Matterhorn rises to 4,478 meters above Zermatt in a near-symmetrical pyramid that has become visual shorthand for Switzerland. Edward Whymper’s party made the first ascent in July 1865, and four of the seven died on the way down when a rope broke, a disaster that made the mountain famous across Europe.
The Jungfraujoch railway station sits at 3,454 meters, the highest in Europe, reached through a tunnel bored inside the Eiger and completed in 1912. Lucerne’s Chapel Bridge, a covered wooden crossing dating from 1333, and the Château de Chillon on the shore of Lake Geneva are the best-known built landmarks, and the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen is the largest waterfall in Europe by volume.
People & Society of Switzerland
Switzerland has about nine million residents, and roughly a quarter hold foreign citizenship, one of the highest shares in Europe, partly because naturalisation is slow, demanding and decided in part at communal level. The largest groups come from Italy, Germany, Portugal and the former Yugoslavia.
Most people live on the Mittelland plateau, and the mountain cantons are thinly settled by comparison. Life expectancy is among the highest in the world, and the country regularly appears near the top of quality-of-life comparisons alongside some of the highest living costs anywhere.
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