Graben is a municipality in the Oberaargau administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland.
Graben is first mentioned in 1220 as Stadonce. In the 19th Century it was known as Graben durch den Wald.
Graben has an area, as of 2009, of 3.16 km2 (1.22 sq mi). Of this area, 1.67 km2 (0.64 sq mi) or 52.8% is used for agricultural purposes, while 1.16 km2 (0.45 sq mi) or 36.7% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 0.22 km2 (0.085 sq mi) or 7.0% is settled (buildings or roads), 0.11 km2 (27 acres) or 3.5% is either rivers or lakes and 0.01 km2 (2.5 acres) or 0.3% is unproductive land.
Of the built up area, housing and buildings made up 4.7% and transportation infrastructure made up 1.9%. 33.9% of the total land area is heavily forested and 2.8% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 36.4% is used for growing crops and 16.1% is pastures. All the water in the municipality is in rivers and streams.
The municipality is located at the confluence of the Önz into the Aare river a nature reserve. It includes the hamlets of Baumgarten, Burach, Gsoll, Hubel, Kleinholz, Schörlishäusern, Schwendi and Stadönz.
Switzerland (/ˈswɪtsərlənd/), officially the Swiss Confederation (Latin: Confoederatio Helvetica, hence its abbreviation CH), is a country in Europe. While still named the "Swiss Confederation" for historical reasons, modern Switzerland is a federal directorial republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities, called Bundesstadt ("federal city"). The country is situated in Western and Central Europe, and is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km2 (15,940 sq mi). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the Swiss population of approximately 8 million people is concentrated mostly on the Plateau, where the largest cities are to be found: among them are the two global and economic centres, Zürich and Geneva.
The establishment of the Swiss Confederation is traditionally dated to 1 August 1291, which is celebrated annually as the Swiss National Day. The country has a long history of armed neutrality—it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815—and did not join the United Nations until 2002. Nevertheless, it pursues an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world. In addition to being the birthplace of the Red Cross, Switzerland is home to numerous international organizations, including the second largest UN office. On the European level, it is a founding member of the European Free Trade Association, but notably it is not part of the European Union, nor the European Economic Area. However the country does participate in the Schengen Area and the EU's single market through a number of bilateral treaties.
Switzerland is an open source network-monitoring utility developed and released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its goal is to monitor network traffic between two systems running the program to see if the user's internet service provider is violating network neutrality, like Comcast does with the BitTorrent protocol.
Switzerland was featured in the Technology section of an issue of New Scientist in August 2008.
Switzerland is a country in Europe.
Switzerland may also refer to: