Basel

Basel occupies both banks of the Rhine at the point where the river leaves the Swiss Plateau for the Rhine graben and turns north. The left bank carries the old town, whose minster stands at 277 metres above sea level, above a river whose mean level is 248 metres. The lowest point of the commune, 244 metres, is also where the Rhine leaves Swiss territory, at the Dreiländereck, between France and Germany. Fourteen bridges cross the Rhine and the Birsig.

The commune counts 177,571 inhabitants in 2024 over 23.91 square kilometres, which makes it the third most populous city in Switzerland, after Zurich and Geneva, and the capital of the canton of Basel-Stadt. Its medieval outline stayed legible for a long time: the ramparts were not pulled down until 1859, and industrial growth only began in 1880. The old centre keeps half-timbered houses and nineteenth-century town mansions; the marl of the neighbouring hills, quarried for building since Roman times, gives the buildings their particular look.

Much of what happens here comes from the river and from the border. The Rhine is navigable from its mouth as far as Basel and no further: the city's port, the only merchant port in Switzerland, is the country's single access to the sea for freight. The built-up area does not stop at the border either, and continues into French Alsace and German Baden-Württemberg.

The city is also a place of study and of collections. The university, founded in 1460, is the oldest in Switzerland; Erasmus of Rotterdam, Paracelsus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Jaspers all attended it. The Kunstmuseum, the largest art museum in the country, descends from a collection opened to the public as early as 1661; the canton holds some forty more. The Basel carnival is inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage, and the Art Basel fair holds here each year one of the world's most important contemporary art events.

Why this place is remarkable

Few Swiss cities sit so entirely on a border: the Rhine leaves the country here, the built-up area carries on into France and Germany, and the port where river navigation stops is Switzerland's only outlet to the sea. To that position add a density of learning and of collections unusual for a commune of 177,571 people: the country's oldest university, opened in 1460, and some forty museums in the canton of Basel-Stadt alone.

History and origin

Basel sits at the southern end of the Rhine graben, between the Jura and the Black Forest, on Tertiary sediments 500 to 1,000 metres thick laid over Mesozoic strata. A fault crosses the east of the city, from Sankt-Jakob to the German village of Tüllingen, and brings it regular tremors. The strongest on record goes back to 1356: nine to ten degrees on the macroseismic scale. Until the seventeenth century a quake of at least seven degrees occurred on average every hundred years; since then the activity has eased, with maxima of six degrees.