City & Region

A city on the slope

Lausanne lies on the first slopes along the north-eastern shore of Lake Geneva, which the French call the Léman. From the lakeside the city climbs more than 500 metres to the forests of the Jorat, and to the south, across the water, the Alps are in view. The city notes that in spring and autumn the climate can change on the way up. The historic centre sits on three hills, the Cité, the Bourg and Saint-Laurent, linked by three large bridges over valleys where the river Flon now runs out of sight underground. To the west the land flattens out, and this is where the universities are.

The slope shapes daily life. Most of the climb is covered by the m2, which the city describes as Switzerland’s first urban metro; it has run since 2008 and carries 25 million passengers a year. An old custom survives too: every night from 22:00 to 02:00 a night watchman, the Guet, calls out the hours.

The city’s statistics office counted 151,284 inhabitants in 2025. The cantonal statistics office, which counts the permanent resident population, gives 145,707 for the end of 2025; the two figures use different definitions.

The capital of Vaud

Lausanne is in the canton of Vaud, and the cantonal constitution of 14 April 2003 states in its Article 4 that Lausanne is the capital of the canton. In April 2025 a member of the cantonal parliament tabled a motion to rotate the capital between the districts every ten years, while keeping parliament and government in Lausanne; parliament referred it to a committee on 8 April 2025 (status as of 3 November 2026).

The canton had 864,226 inhabitants at the end of 2025 and 300 municipalities on 1 January 2026. It covers 2,821 square kilometres without its lakes, or 3,212 with them. In 2024 the University of Lausanne and EPFL together had 31,431 students.

The Olympic Capital

The International Olympic Committee moved its headquarters from Paris to Lausanne in 1915, in the middle of the First World War. Pierre de Coubertin was looking for a peaceful and stable base, and called the city the most apt location imaginable for the headquarters of Olympism. The IOC first worked from the Casino de Montbenon; in 1922 the city gave it rooms in the Villa Mon-Repos, where Coubertin had his study, and in 1968 it invited the IOC to the Château de Vidy by the lake.

The city formally received the title of Olympic Capital in 1994. The Olympic Museum opened on 23 June 1993 on the Quai d’Ouchy. Olympic House, the IOC’s present headquarters at Vidy, was inaugurated on 23 June 2019; its construction uncovered the former commercial port of the Roman town of Lousonna. In January 2020 Lausanne hosted the third Winter Youth Olympic Games, with about 1,880 athletes aged 15 to 18 from 70 nations.

According to the IOC, which cites a study published in 2015, 31 international sports organisations have offices in the Lausanne area and 36 in the canton of Vaud.

EPFL and the ETH Domain

EPFL is one of the federal institutions of the ETH Domain. The domain consists of two Federal Institutes of Technology, ETH Zurich and EPFL, four research institutes – PSI, WSL, Empa and Eawag – and the ETH Board as its strategic management body. The Swiss Model route of the Atlas, below, follows this network from Geneva through Lausanne and Villigen to Zürich. The Swiss Plasma Center itself works at two of these institutions, with TCV in Lausanne and its superconductor tests at PSI in Villigen.

Science profile

Lausanne’s science, as followed on this site, is that of its two universities and the university hospital: plasma physics and fusion at the Swiss Plasma Center, engineering, computing and mathematics at EPFL, and life sciences and medicine at the University of Lausanne and the CHUV. The institutions are described on Institutes & Facilities, and places to visit on Science Travel.

On the Atlas

Lausanne lies on two routes of the TheScience.fm Atlas: Big Machines, between Geneva and Villigen, which links large machines for particles, photons and plasma, and Swiss Model, also between Geneva and Villigen on its way to Zürich, which follows the federal institutions of the ETH Domain.