Thurgau

The canton borders the German state of Baden-Württemberg and the canton of Schaffhausen to the north. In the south, near the Hörnli is the border point with the cantons of St. Gallen and Zurich. Below the summit of the ridge is in the municipality of Fischingen with 991 meters above sea level, the highest point of the canton. At least as high is the southernmost point of the canton, situated below the Chlihörnli, where the cantons of Thurgau, St. Gallen and Zurich meet.

Frauenfeld is the main town and seat of the cantonal government and the supreme court. The Grand Council meets in Frauenfeld in summer and in Weinfelden in winter. The canton of Thurgau takes its name from the River Thur, which crosses it from southeast to northwest and flows into the Rhine further west in the Zurich district of Andelfingen.

In the canton, 61.0 percent of the total area is used as agricultural land.

Geoportal

ThurGIS Viewer is the official portal of the Canton of Thurgau for the presentation of geodata of the cantonal administration via the Internet.

Languages

The German dialects spoken in Thurgau belong to the High Alemannic dialect and within it to the Eastern Swiss dialect.

Demographics

The canton of Thurgau had a permanent resident population of 276,472 on 31 December 2018. The gender distribution is balanced with 139,185 men as well as 137,287 women. 117,130 are single, 123,224 married, 12,504 widowed and 23,610 divorced, unmarried or in a judicially dissolved partnership. No information was given by 4.

There are 202,576 Swiss nationals and 73,896 nationals of other countries. 22,542 of the direct neighbours are from Germany, 9,383 from Italy, 1,813 from Austria and 241 from France. 4,730 from Portugal, 2,616 from Turkey, 1,720 from Serbia, 1,683 from Hungary, 1,411 from Spain, 1,344 from Slovakia and 1,411 from Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are 39,900 residents from other countries. There are 12 stateless persons and 20 residents did not provide any information.

Religion

The Reformed population belongs to the Protestant National Church of the Canton of Thurgau, the Catholic population belongs to the Diocese of Basel under church law and to the Catholic National Church of the Canton of Thurgau under state church law. Compared to the previous year, the proportion of the population that is non-denominational or belongs to another denomination outside the national churches increased strongly in 2017 (+3900 persons or +4.4%). In total, 93,750 people did not belong to any national church at the end of 2017. At 34.4 %, their proportion is higher than that of the Protestant (33.9 %) or Catholic population (31.7 %) for the first time.

Since the 2000 census, no membership figures for other religious communities (apart from the two national churches) are available for the total population of the Canton of Thurgau. However, the Federal Statistical Office carries out sample surveys in which other religious communities in the canton are also recorded. According to the figures from the 2017 sample survey, 14.2% of respondents aged 15 and over in the canton of Thurgau state that they are members of a religious community outside the national churches: 6.6% belong to other Christian churches (including free churches and Orthodox churches), 6.5% profess Islam and a further 1.1% are followers of other religions. According to the survey, the proportion of the population that does not belong to a national church also varies greatly when the nationality or origin of the respondents is taken into account:

As a former common dominion (common subject territory of several confederate places), Thurgau is not denominationally uniform. In the greater part of today's canton, the Reformed confession dominates, but there are several areas with Catholic confession. After the first and second Kappel religious wars in the 16th century, the second Landfrieden (peace treaty) at the Tagsatzung, which was dominated by the Catholic estates, stipulated that the newly created religious conditions should be protected, but that Catholic services must be reintroduced at the request of three believers in a parish and that the pastoral estates should be administered jointly. Furthermore, the principle of territoriality was mostly applied, the landlords (Thurgau was divided into many local lordships) could significantly influence the religion of the subjects, but could not always assert themselves. Many parish churches were formed in which the churches were used by both denominations, but this was more or less peaceful. The first Reformed church to be built in Thurgau was the church of Scherzingen, built in 1617/1618 under the patronage (collature) of the convent of Münsterlingen. With the Fourth Peace of 1712, the Reformed were put on an equal footing with the Catholic denomination. The common parsonages, but also in many places the cemeteries, were divided according to the proportion of the confessions. Some Reformed parishes, such as Schönholzerswilen (1714), Roggwil (1746) and Erlen (1764), were able to build new churches in the 18th century, which had been denied them before 1712. Until 1798, it often happened that Catholic collators appointed the so-called predicants (pastors) in the Reformed parishes. With the abolition of many ecclesiastical monasteries and the bishopric of Constance, these rights of collators fell to the canton of Thurgau, which after 1820 awarded them to the individual parishes.