Geography
Alt St. Johann has an area, as of 2006, of 53.1 km2 (20.5 sq mi). Of this area, 54.7% is used for agricultural purposes, while 31.4% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 2.1% is settled (buildings or roads) and the remainder (11.8%) is non-productive (rivers or lakes). The municipalities of Alt St. Johann and Wildhaus merged on 1 January 2010 into the new municipality of Wildhaus-Alt St.Johann.
The municipality is located in the Toggenburg Wahlkreis. It is the second highest municipality in the Thur valley. It consists of the villages of Alt St. Johann and Unterwasser and the hamlet of Starkenbach on the valley floor. Higher up in the valley are scattered settlements on the valley sides as well as seasonal alpine settlements on the northern slope of the Churfirsten and into the Alpstein sub-range of the Appenzell Alps. It lies at the foot of Säntis.
Read more about this topic: Alt St. Johann
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)