Two-thirds of Switzerland’s land mass lies in alpine areas and several thousand lakes provide 1,000 km of shoreline. The land-locked ‘island’ republic borders Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north and Liechtenstein to the east.
With its linguistic diversity and cultural distinctions, the Swiss national identity of individual self-reliance is forged by dealing full-on with the exigencies of nature, geography and climate. The character of Switzerland is rooted in federalism and centuries of direct democracy.
Switzerland has a famously long history of stubborn armed neutrality reaching back to the reformation of more than 500 years. Since 1515, Switzerland has been a neutral state except for a little fracas with Napoleon which resulted from 1815 with the republic’s guaranteed independence and neutrality.
It is no coincidence that Switzerland was the birthplace of the Red Cross and Red Crescent and the republic continues to actively involved in world peacekeeping, is home to poets, writers as well as scientists and dreamers. Switzerland has more registered patents and Nobel laureates per capita than any other nationality. The powerful CERN nuclear physics laboratory with its gigantic particle collider is near Geneva. Einstein lived in Bern when he developed the special theory of relativity.