containing several families. However, the rural landscape is characterised by smallvillages and farmhouses surrounded by fields or on the hillsides.Villages become towns and towns remain as villagesZurich has 336,000 inhabitants and is the largest city in Switzerland. The second largestcity is Geneva has 172,800, followed by Basle with 168,700.The capital, Bern, has123,300, and Lausanne 114,200. Taken along with its suburbs, Zurich also forms thelargest conurbation with nearly one million inhabitants. About one third of the country'spopulation live in the conurbations of the five biggest cities. In recent years the trend hasbeen for people to move out of the cit centres into the communes of the outer suburbs. Even the big cities feel like small towns. There are no dominating skylines. You can seewhere you are, you do not feel overwhelmed. Everything is on a human scale, structuredand managed, familiar and safe. The central area has usually developed over centuries.Zurich, for example, was founded by the Romans. The old part of Bern is on theUNESCO list of world heritage sites.There are also many well-preserved smallmediaeval towns, but the larger buildings in cities mostly date from the 19th century andare government buildings, banks or large hotels.TransitSwitzerland stands on the route linking northern and southern Europe, but the Alps madetransit difficult until tunnels were built through them. The Gotthard railway tunnel, 19km (12 miles) long, was built more than 100 years ago. The Gotthard road tunnel, openedin 1980, was the longest in the world at 16.5 km (10 miles) until Norway's Laerdal tunnel(24.5 km/15 miles) opened in November 2000. Switzerland's position as a transit countryhas exposed it to ever increasing amounts of freight traffic. Europe is moving closertogether. Business knows no boundaries. As a result, the road network is coming underheavy pressure, and gigantic queues build up, especially on the Gotthard route.From t...
