Switzerland 🇨🇭

Switzerland is a country in Western Europe, one of the 8 entries this site files under that subregion. The long form of the name is Swiss Confederation. Bern is the capital.

By land area it covers 41,284 km², which ranks it 136th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Netherlands and just ahead of Bhutan. That makes it almost exactly the same size as the Netherlands.

Around 9.0 million people live there, placing it 100th of 249 by population — between Belarus above it and Sierra Leone below. Within Western Europe alone it is the 4th largest of 8 and the 5th most populous.

Switzerland has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: Germany, France and Italy have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Switzerland's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Switzerland's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Switzerland's borders, Austria and Liechtenstein are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇮🇹 Italy

The coordinates the dataset gives are 47.0° N, 8.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,232 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

5 countries share a land border with it: Austria, France, Italy, Liechtenstein and Germany. The largest of them by area is France, while the most populous is Germany. Together those neighbours hold about 220.2 million people.

Switzerland is landlocked. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. 2 of its neighbours, Austria and Liechtenstein, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 218 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

People from Switzerland are called Swiss.

It recognises 4 languages: French, Italian, Romansh and Swiss German. Romansh and Swiss German are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Switzerland. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

Inside Europe it places 19th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 4.7% of everyone living in Western Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Western Europe and Switzerland sits 5th of 8 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Belgium just above and Luxembourg just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Germany is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Western Europe has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇧🇪 Belgium
• 🇱🇺 Luxembourg
• 🇩🇪 Germany

Money there is the Swiss franc (Fr., CHF). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Bern is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Websites there use the .ch domain. Calls from overseas start with +41. Its ISO codes are ch and CHE, which is what most databases and flag files use.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Switzerland does not have the Swiss franc to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is CHF, and the other one is listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in CHF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Switzerland among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.