Canton of Lucerne in the context of "Canton of Bern"

Lucerne (English: /luːˈsɜːrn/ loo-SURN) or Luzern (Swiss Standard German: [luˈtsɛrn] ) is a city and a municipality in central Switzerland, in the German-speaking portion of the country. Lucerne is the capital of the canton of Lucerne and part of the district of the same name. With a population of approximately 82,000 people, Lucerne is the most populous city in Central Switzerland, and a nexus of economics, transport, culture, and media in the region. The city's urban area consists of 19 municipalities and towns with an overall population of about 220,000 people.

Owing to its location on the shores of Lake Lucerne (German: Vierwaldstättersee) and its outflow, the river Reuss, within sight of the mounts Pilatus and Rigi in the Swiss Alps, Lucerne has long been a destination for tourists. One of the city's landmarks is the Chapel Bridge (German: Kapellbrücke), a wooden bridge first erected in the 14th century.

Districts of Switzerland are a political subdivision for cantons. In the federally constituted Switzerland, each canton is completely free to decide its own internal organisation. Therefore, there exists a variety of structures and terminology for the subnational entities between canton and municipality, loosely termed districts. Most cantons are divided into Bezirke (German for districts, singular Bezirk). They are also termed Ämter (Lucerne, singular Amt), Amtsbezirke (Bern, Amtsbezirk), district (in French) or distretto (Ticino and part of Graubünden). The Bezirke generally provide only administration and court organization. However, for historical reasons districts in cantons Grisons and Schwyz are their own legal entities with jurisdiction over tax and often have their own Landsgemeinde.

Seven of the 26 cantons – Uri, Obwalden, Nidwalden, Glarus, Zug, Basel-City and Geneva – have always existed without the district level of government. An eighth one, Appenzell Innerrhoden, uses no intermediate level either, but calls its lowest-level subdivisions Bezirke, although they are functionally equivalent to municipalities elsewhere.

Central Switzerland is a subdivision of Switzerland as defined by the Federal Statistical Office for statistical purposes. It is classified as a NUTS-2 statistical region of Switzerland, and encompasses the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, Obwalden, Nidwalden, Lucerne and Zug. It incorporates the highlands in the central portion of the country.

The Sonderbund War (German: Sonderbundskrieg, French: Guerre du Sonderbund, Italian: Guerra del Sonderbund) of November 1847 was a civil war in Switzerland, then still a relatively loose confederacy of cantons. It ensued after seven Catholic cantons formed the Sonderbund ("separate alliance") in 1845 to protect their interests against a centralization of power. The war concluded with the defeat of the Sonderbund. It resulted in the emergence of Switzerland as a federal state, concluding the period of political "restoration and regeneration" in Switzerland.

The Sonderbund consisted of the cantons of Lucerne, Fribourg, Valais, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Zug, all predominantly Catholic and governed by conservative administrations. The cantons of Ticino and Solothurn, also predominantly Catholic but governed by liberal administrations, did not join the alliance.

Lucerne District (German: Luzern) is a former Amt (administrative district) of the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. It had a population of 176,710 (as of 2013) and consisted of 17 municipalities, of which the city of Lucerne is the largest and the district capital. On 1 January 2013 the Amt was divided into two Wahlkreis, Lucerne-Stadt and Lucerne-Land.

The Rigi (or Mount Rigi; also known as Queen of the Mountains) is a mountain massif of the Alps, located in Central Switzerland. The whole massif is almost entirely surrounded by the water of three different bodies of water: Lake Lucerne, Lake Zug and Lake Lauerz. The range is in the Schwyzer Alps, and is split between the cantons of Schwyz and Lucerne, although the main summit, named Rigi Kulm, at 1,797 meters above sea level, lies within the canton of Schwyz. The Rigi Kulm Hotel, established in 1816, is located on the summit.

The Rigi Kulm and other areas, such as the resort of Rigi Kaltbad, are served by Europe's oldest mountain railways, the Rigi Railways. The whole area offers many activities such as skiing or sledging in the winter, and hiking in the summer.

The Brünig-Napf-Reuss line forms a geographical boundary in traditional Swiss culture (Kulturgrenze). Running from the Brünig Pass along the Napf region to the Reuss (which joins the Aare at Brugg), it partly separates western (Bernese German) and eastern (Zurich German) varieties of High Alemannic, although some places east of the line belong to the western dialect group (Schwyz, Zug). The line runs across the cantons of Lucerne and Aargau.

The concept was first proposed by Richard Weiss in 1947, and it reflects the cultural situation in Switzerland as established by ethnographic field work during the early 20th century.Some historians and ethnographers argued that this cultural boundary is of greater importance historically than the French-German language boundary (the Röstigraben), even though it is widely admitted that the "line" doesn't form a sharp division but especially in its northern part "fans out" into a gradient.

A family farm is generally understood to be a farm owned and/or operated by a family. It is sometimes considered to be an estate passed down by inheritance.

Although a recurring conceptual and archetypal distinction is that of a family farm as a smallholding versus corporate farming as large-scale agribusiness, that notion does not accurately describe the realities of farm ownership in many countries. Family farm businesses can take many forms, from smallholder farms to larger farms operated under intensive farming practices. In various countries, most farm families have structured their farm businesses as corporations (such as limited liability companies) or trusts, for liability, tax, and business purposes. Thus, the idea of a family farm as a unitary concept or definition does not easily translate across languages, cultures, or centuries, as there are substantial differences in agricultural traditions and histories between countries and between centuries within a country. For example, in U.S. agriculture, a family farm can be of any size, as long as the ownership is held within a family. A 2014 USDA report shows that family farms operate 90 percent of the nation's farmland, and account for 85 percent of the country's agricultural production value. However, that does not at all imply that corporate farming is a small presence in U.S. agriculture; rather, it simply reflects the fact that many corporations are closely held. In contrast, in Brazilian agriculture, the official definition of a family farm (agricultura familiar) is limited to small farms worked primarily by members of a single family; but again, this fact does not imply that corporate farming is a small presence in Brazilian agriculture; rather, it simply reflects the fact that large farms with many workers cannot be legally classified under the family farm label because that label is legally reserved for smallholdings in that country.