Sibirie, Afrika, Le Brésil, Himalaia – as toponyms go, none of these place names sounds particularly Swiss. And yet they are all to be found right here in Switzerland, where an estimated several hundred such ‘exotic’ names have been borrowed from elsewhere. Most of these ‘exotic’ geographic and place names were coined in the last two to three centuries – and for very different reasons. SWI swissinfo.ch regularly publishes articles from the Swiss National Museum’s blog dedicated to historical topics. The articles are always written in German and usually also in French and English. The logic behind the naming of Vesuv in Heiligenschwendi in the canton of Bern is obvious: the hill’s roughly conical form is similar to that of Vesuvius, the celebrated volcano in southern Italy. But the similarities of many other places to the original geographic locations and features that inspired them are a lot less apparent – and often somewhat far-fetched. The area of countryside in J
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