Lausanne

Lausanne is built on a slope. From the harbour of Ouchy, at 374 metres, to the Chalet-à-Gobet pass, at 873, the commune crosses more than 500 metres of height over 41.38 km². The centre stands on three hills — la Cité, le Bourg, Saint-Laurent — separated by the ravines cut by the Flon and the Louve and joined by the Grand-Pont and the pont Bessières; sixteen rivers run across the communal territory. The city counted 144,873 inhabitants on 31 December 2024, and its agglomeration 438,438 on 31 December 2021: it is the fourth in Switzerland by population, after Zurich, Geneva and Basel.

The name comes from the Celtic lausa, a flat stone, and from a suffix used to form the names of watercourses: Lousonna first meant the Flon, or part of its course, before naming the Gallo-Roman vicus founded on the lakeshore from 15 BC, where the district of Vidy now lies. In the middle of the fourth century the vicus was left behind: people moved up to the hill of la Cité, which its escarpments made defensible. Lausanne then became a stage on the via Francigena — Sigeric records it as Losanna in 990 — and from 1032 to 1536 the bishop and the chapter governed here a small ecclesiastical state reaching from the Veveyse to the Venoge, including the Lavaux vineyard.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame was built in the main between about 1170 and 1230. It is the most important Gothic cathedral in Switzerland, and the first of that style raised outside French territory: its models were taken from northern France and southern England. Pope Gregory X and Emperor Rudolf consecrated it in 1275; the city then became a Marian pilgrimage site drawing more than 70,000 people a year, nearly ten times its population at the time. Its Painted Portal is one of the few in Europe still holding substantial traces of its original polychromy, and a watchman still calls the hour from the belfry to the four points of the compass, every night of the year.

What Lausanne became rests on a few decisions. The opening of the Simplon tunnel, in 1906, made it an international rail junction. In 1915 Pierre de Coubertin moved the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee here; the city has held the official title of Olympic Capital since 1993. The Palais de Rumine, raised in 1896 by the Lyon architect Gaspard André, holds the place de la Riponne and houses museums today. The first pedestrian zone in Switzerland was created here in 1962, and the M2 metro, opened in 2008, is the country's first automatic metro. On the Dorigny fields by the lake, the campus brings together the University of Lausanne and the Federal Institute of Technology, some 26,000 students.

Why this place is remarkable

Lausanne cannot be visited on the flat. The city crosses more than 500 metres between the harbour of Ouchy and the Chalet-à-Gobet, and its centre stands on three hills separated by two ravines that had to be bridged or filled: the bridges, the tunnel and the metro are a consequence of the relief, not a decoration. At the top, a cathedral begun about 1170, whose portal still keeps its paint; at the bottom, the lake. And since 1915 the International Olympic Committee has had its seat here — a second, less visible reason to be known.

History and origin

The site has been inhabited since 6000 BC according to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. The vicus of Lousonna, founded on the lakeshore from 15 BC, grew until the middle of the third century, declined with the Germanic invasions and gave way to the hill of la Cité in the middle of the fourth century. The episcopal state lasted from 1032 to 1536; in that year the Bernese took the city, the bishop fled, the Reformation was established and the academy founded. The relief long dictated the rest: only in the nineteenth century did the 'crossing of Lausanne', designed by the engineer Adrien Pichard, span the Flon ravine with a great bridge and pierce the spur of la Barre with a tunnel.