The German Town Surrounded by Switzerland
Büsingen uses Swiss francs, Swiss phone area codes, and Swiss garbage collection — it is legally German.
Büsingen am Hochrhein, population 1,400, sits on a bend of the Rhine inside Switzerland. It is indisputably German — part of Baden-Württemberg, served by German courts and German passports — yet you cannot drive to it from Germany without crossing Swiss territory.
The encirclement dates to 1693, when the Holy Roman Empire seized land around the town in a military dispute. Post-war treaties confirmed the anomaly: the 1954 German-Swiss agreement formalized Büsingen as German sovereign territory within Swiss customs borders.
The practical result is a town that runs two economies simultaneously. Residents shop in Swiss stores and pay in Swiss francs. They call local numbers using Swiss area codes. Their garbage is collected by Swiss trucks. But their taxes go to Berlin, their cars bear German plates (the district code BÜS), and their disputes go to German courts in Singen — which requires crossing the border.
Alcohol and cigarettes from Büsingen are technically German goods but may not be brought back into Germany in large quantities without declaring them as Swiss imports. The town has a small duty-free trade based entirely on this gap.
There is one other German exclave of this type: Vennbahn, a strip of former railway land in Belgium — but Büsingen is the only inhabited one with permanent residents navigating both legal systems every day.
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