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Can you locate all 50 provinces of Spain?
Can you place all 290 municipalities of Sweden?
Can you locate all 83 federal subjects of Russia?
Can you locate all 21 counties of Sweden?
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Switzerland is small enough to cross in an afternoon and still changes language three times on the way, and the canton is the unit all of it hangs on: the number plate, the school system, the tax rate and the language on the signs change at a canton line. A round here is mostly a question of which of 26 neighbours you are standing in.
Twenty-six cantons, six of which are called half-cantons for historical reasons and are otherwise cantons like the rest: Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft, which split in 1833, the two Appenzells, which split in 1597 over the Reformation, and the two Unterwalden cantons, Obwalden and Nidwalden. Basel-Stadt is little more than the city and two villages, so it has a tap area wider than its outline, and so does Appenzell Innerrhoden, which Ausserrhoden wraps on every side but one.
Graubünden, which English calls the Grisons, is the largest by a distance, and Valais, Bern and Ticino follow. The centre of the country is a cluster of small cantons around Lake Lucerne that were the original confederation, and it is where the quiz gets hard. The local name is a switch in the start dialog: the Grisons are Graubünden, Geneva is Genève, and Lucerne is Luzern.
The groups are the seven regions the Federal Statistical Office reports by. They are not a political tier, but they follow geography closely enough to be worth learning: Lake Geneva, the Mittelland between the Alps and the Jura, the northwest on the Rhine, Zurich on its own, the east, the centre, and Ticino on its own south of the Alps.
Graubünden is the largest canton and the only one where Romansh is an official language, alongside German and Italian. Its borders touch Austria, Italy and Liechtenstein, which is the clue to look for when it is the answer.
Basel-Stadt is the smallest canton, a city and two villages on the Rhine where Switzerland meets France and Germany. Basel-Landschaft surrounds it on the Swiss side.
Jura was part of Bern until 1979, when a vote created it as the 26th canton. It sits in the northwest against France, and it is the only canton created since the federal state was founded in 1848.
Twenty-six. Six of them are half-cantons, which have one seat rather than two in the Council of States but are cantons in every other sense.
Both. The canton of Bern is the region, and the city of Bern is the federal city, which the Swiss do not call a capital. This quiz asks for the canton.
The canton split in 1597 along the line of the Reformation: Ausserrhoden went Protestant and Innerrhoden stayed Catholic. Innerrhoden is the smaller and is enclosed by the other.
For another country at this level, see Austria States or Germany States.
