Altdorf, Uri

Altdorf is a municipality of about 9,600 inhabitants and the capital of the Swiss canton of Uri, which retains historic town privileges. According to legend it is the place where William Tell shot the apple from his son's head. The town proper stands at about 458 metres on a flat alluvial plain on the right bank of the Reuss, roughly two kilometres south of the point where the river enters the Urnersee, an arm of Lake Lucerne, and the municipality covers 10.2 square kilometres including the hamlets of Eggbergen high above the town. It lies at the junction of two major Alpine routes, the Saint Gotthard pass to the south and the Klausen pass to the east, and it is the last station on the Gotthard railway before the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world's longest railway tunnel. The official language is Swiss Standard German, though the local Alemannic dialect is what people speak. The earliest evidence of settlement is a group of La Tène bronze axe-heads and iron tools from the 3rd century BCE.