Olten

Olten is a municipality and town in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland and the capital of the district of the same name. It grew into a town in the Middle Ages at a bridge over the Aare, declined for a time, then grew rapidly as a railway town after the railway arrived in 1856. Its station is a major rail hub of Switzerland at the junction of lines to Zurich, Basel, Bern and Lucerne, each within 30 minutes by train, and the town has a depot of Swiss Federal Railways. The population first reached 1,000 in the later 18th century and 7,000 by 1900; in December 2020 it was 18,496 across an area of about 11.49 square kilometres. A Roman vicus stood at the site, medieval Olten is first mentioned in 1201 as Oltun, and Magdalenian artefacts have been excavated nearby. The writers of the Gruppe Olten, including Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and the Swiss Alpine Club in 1863 were founded in the railway station restaurant.