Laufen District

Laufen District or Laufental District (District de Laufon) is one of the five districts of the largely German-speaking canton of Basel-Country, Switzerland. Its capital is the town of Laufen. Prior to 1994, it was a district of the canton of Bern, one of the seven historical districts of the Bernese Jura. In 1979, three neighbouring French-speaking districts of Bern seceded to form the new canton of Jura. Laufen was left as an exclave of Bern, wedged between Jura, Solothurn, Basel-Country, and France. In 1989, the populace voted to secede from Bern and join Basel-Country. After a transitional period of preparation, this was effected in 1994. It had a population of (as of ). Laufen district has an area, , of . Of this area, or 36.3% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 52.2% is forested. Of the rest of the land, or 10.5% is settled (buildings or roads), or 0.7% is either rivers or lakes and or 0.3% is unproductive land. Of the built up area, industrial buildings made up 1.2% of the total area while housing and buildings made up 4.9% and transportation infrastructure made up 3.2%. Out of the forested land, 49.8% of the total land area is heavily forested and 2.4% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 17.1% is used for growing crops and 14.9% is pastures, while 1.6% is used for orchards or vine crops and 2.6% is used for alpine pastures. All the water in the municipality is flowing water. Laufen contains a total of thirteen municipalities: Laufen district has a population () of . , 14.9% of the population are resident foreign nationals. Most of the population () speaks German (15,363 or 89.4%), with Italian language being second most common (513 or 3.0%) and Albanian being third (261 or 1.5%). There are 235 people who speak French and 10 people who speak Romansh. the gender distribution of the population was 50.4% male and 49.6% female. The population was made up of 15,891 Swiss citizens (83.9% of the population), and 3,044 non-Swiss residents (16.