Switzerland covers 41,291 km² (15,943 sq mi), according to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, which places it about 132nd among the world’s countries by area. It is slightly smaller than the European part of the Netherlands (41,543 km²) and a little smaller than Denmark without Greenland (43,094 km²). On the map it forms an irregular quadrilateral roughly 350 km from west to east and about 220 km from north to south, yet it holds a vertical range of more than 4,400 metres: from 193 m on Lake Maggiore to 4,634 m on the Dufourspitze of Monte Rosa. About 9.15 million people (2026 estimate) live there, an average of around 222 per km².
The easiest way to feel that size is to cross it: first north to south, then west to east. After that come the three landscape bands, the climb from lowest to highest point, the single time zone and the frontier around it all.
Bargen to Pedrinate: the 220 km north–south crossing
Switzerland’s northernmost point lies at 47°48′N at Oberbargen, a hamlet in the municipality of Bargen in the canton of Schaffhausen. Schaffhausen is one of the few parts of the country north of the Rhine; most of the northern border with Germany follows the river, but here Swiss territory spills over onto the German side, and the German village of Büsingen am Hochrhein sits as an enclave entirely surrounded by Swiss land.
Head south from Bargen and you cross the Rhine, the hills of Zürich canton, the lakes of central Switzerland around Lucerne, then the full width of the Alps through Uri. The Gotthard Base Tunnel now carries trains under this barrier: opened in June 2016, its 57.09 km route between Erstfeld in Uri and Giornico in Ticino is the world’s longest railway tunnel and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps. Emerging in Ticino, you descend to Bellinzona, the cantonal capital, cross Monte Ceneri into the Sottoceneri and reach the southernmost point at 45°49′N, the village of Pedrinate on a hill above Chiasso.
Those two latitudes are almost exactly two degrees apart, which is why the north–south extent is usually given as about 220 km. From Chiasso the nearest sea, the Gulf of Genoa, is still about 160 km further south: Switzerland is landlocked, and the whole of Ticino lies on the Italian side of the Alpine watershed.
Chancy to Piz Chavalatsch: 350 km from the Rhône to the Ortler
The long axis runs the other way. The westernmost point, at 5°57′E, is in Chancy, a small municipality of 5.36 km² in the canton of Geneva. Geneva itself sits at the south-western tip of Lake Geneva, a lake of about 580 km² of which 60% (345 km²) is Swiss and 40% belongs to the French department of Haute-Savoie.
Travelling east, you follow the north shore of Lake Geneva through Vaud, then the Rhône valley up through Valais, where the bilingual canton’s capital Sion lies between the Bernese Alps to the north and the Pennine Alps to the south. The Rhône, from the Rhône Glacier near the Furka Pass, and the Rhine, from Lake Toma near the Oberalp Pass, rise only about 22 km apart, yet they reach the sea roughly 1,000 km apart, the Rhône in the French Camargue and the Rhine at Rotterdam. Over the Oberalp you enter Graubünden, the largest canton at 7,105 km², about a sixth of the country, where Romansh is still spoken in several regions alongside German and Italian.
The journey ends in Val Müstair. The easternmost point of Switzerland is at 10°29′E on Piz Chavalatsch, a 2,763 m summit of the Ortler range on the border with the Italian province of Bolzano. From Chancy to Piz Chavalatsch the straight-line distance is about 350 km, and the four and a half degrees of longitude between them are the reason Switzerland looks wider than it is tall on any map.
Jura, Plateau and Alps: three bands across 41,291 km²
Cut across Switzerland from north-west to south-east and you pass through three strips that run roughly parallel to the long axis. By area, the Alps make up about 60% of the country, the Swiss Plateau about 30% and the Jura about 10%.
- The Jura follows much of the French border in the north-west, from Geneva canton to Basel and beyond. Its highest Swiss summit is Mont Tendre in Vaud at 1,679 m, which is also the highest point in Switzerland outside the Alps. The range gave its name to the canton of Jura and to the Jurassic period.
- The Swiss Plateau (Mittelland) runs from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance, mostly between 400 and 700 m above sea level. Partly flat but mostly hilly, it holds Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zürich and most of the population, industry and transport links.
- The Swiss Alps cover the south and south-east, as far as the Bernina range near St. Moritz. Glaciers here cover about 1,063 km², and lakes and glaciers together take up roughly 6% of the national territory.
Two small areas fall outside the three bands: the land around Basel north of the Rhine, which lies beyond the Jura, and the Mendrisio district in southern Ticino, which belongs to the Po Valley. Because the Alps are so thinly settled outside big valleys such as the Valais, the country feels much smaller to the people who live in it than its 41,291 km² suggests: most of them share the 30% that is Plateau.
The point that balances the whole shape lies on the northern edge of the Alps. In 1988 the federal mapping agency, Swisstopo, calculated the centre of mass of Switzerland’s outline at 46°48′N, 8°13′E, on Älggi-Alp in the municipality of Sachseln, Obwalden. Because that exact spot is hard to reach, a marker stone was placed about 500 m to the south-east at 1,645 m.
From Lake Maggiore at 193 m to the Dufourspitze at 4,634 m
Horizontal distances undersell Switzerland, because so much of it is tilted. The lowest point in the country is the surface of Lake Maggiore at about 193 m, on the Ticino shore near Locarno and Ascona. Ascona, at 196 m, is the lowest permanently inhabited place.
Less than 100 km to the west, just inside the Italian border above Zermatt in Valais, the Dufourspitze of Monte Rosa reaches 4,634 m (15,203 ft), the highest point in Switzerland. The Dom, at 4,545 m in the Mischabel range, is the highest mountain lying entirely on Swiss soil, and the Matterhorn, at 4,478 m, stands on the same frontier. In all, 48 Swiss mountains reach 4,000 m or more. North of the Rhône valley the Bernese Alps peak at 4,274 m on the Finsteraarhorn, and the Jungfrau (4,158 m) rises above the Lauterbrunnen valley.
People live high in this vertical country too. Juf, at 2,126 m at the head of the Avers valley in Graubünden, is the highest permanently inhabited village; St. Moritz, at 1,822 m, is the highest town; and the railway station at Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 m, is the highest in Switzerland. The gap between Lake Maggiore and the Dufourspitze is about 4,440 m, packed into less than 100 km of horizontal distance.
One clock from Geneva to Val Müstair
Four and a half degrees of longitude is not enough to split a country into time zones, and Switzerland has only one. It uses Central European Time (UTC+1) in winter and Central European Summer Time (UTC+2) in summer, the same as Germany, France, Italy and Austria.
Its clock history shows how small the country already was in the railway age. From July 1853 every Swiss telegraph and post office kept Bernese time, a local mean time measured from the Zytglogge clock tower in Bern at 29 minutes and 45.5 seconds ahead of Greenwich. On 1 June 1894 the whole country adopted UTC+1. Daylight saving time was tried in 1941 and 1942, then rejected by voters in a 1978 referendum, so in 1980 Switzerland spent six months an hour out of step with all its neighbours except Liechtenstein. It joined the European summer-time schedule in 1981. The German exclave of Büsingen, surrounded by Swiss territory, had kept Swiss time in 1980 rather than switch with the rest of Germany.
Five neighbours along roughly 1,900 km of frontier
For its area, Switzerland has a long border. Adding up the published lengths of its five land boundaries gives about 1,900 km, enclosing a territory only 350 km across at its widest. The outline is jagged because it follows Alpine ridges and the Rhine, and cuts through Lake Geneva, Lake Constance and Lake Maggiore.
The longest stretch, 744 km with Italy, runs from the French–Swiss–Italian tripoint at Mont Dolent to the tripoint near Piz Lad in the east, climbing above 4,600 m near the Dufourspitze and dropping below 200 m at Lake Maggiore. The 572 km border with France was largely set by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Geneva, Neuchâtel and Valais joined the Confederation, and was last adjusted in 2002. The 362 km line with Germany mostly follows the High Rhine and Lake Constance, while Austria’s 180 km comes in two pieces split by Liechtenstein, whose own border with Switzerland is about 41 km. A second enclave, the Italian municipality of Campione d’Italia on Lake Lugano, sits inside Swiss territory; Switzerland itself has no exclaves. For the crossings and the history of each boundary, see our guide to the countries that border Switzerland.
Measuring Switzerland against the Netherlands, Denmark and its own cantons
Among European countries Switzerland sits in a cluster of similar-sized states. The European Netherlands covers 41,543 km², almost the same footprint; the side-by-side comparison in is the Netherlands bigger than Switzerland? shows how close the two outlines are. Denmark, excluding Greenland and the Faroe Islands, is a little larger at about 43,094 km².
Inside the country, the cantons vary enormously in size. Switzerland is divided into 26 cantons, which range from Basel-Stadt at 37 km² to Graubünden at 7,105 km², a ratio of almost 200 to 1. Zürich, the most populous canton with about 1.55 million people (2020), is a fraction of Graubünden’s size.
The headline numbers, 41,291 km², 350 km by 220 km and about 1,900 km of frontier, describe a small country. What stretches it is relief: an east–west trip can be done in a day, but between Bargen and Pedrinate lie the Plateau, the main Alpine chain and a 57 km tunnel, and between Ascona and the Dufourspitze lie more than four vertical kilometres. To follow that relief range by range, read our guide to the Alps mountain range, which continues the story beyond Switzerland into France, Italy and Austria.