Baar has an area,, of. Of this area, 51% is used for agricultural purposes, while 25% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 22.8% is settled and the remainder is non-productive. The municipality is located in the northern portion of the flood plain of the Lorze river. It was originally a linear villagealong the road between Lake Zug and Lake Zurich. Since the 1960s it has grown rapidly. It consists of the village of Baar and the former hamlets of Allenwinden, Blickensdorf and Inwil, as well as the farm houses of Deinikon.
Demographics
Baar has a population of. , 24.9% of the population was made up of foreign nationals. Over the last 10 years, the population has grown at a rate of 20.9%. Most of the population speaks German, with Italian being second most common and Serbo-Croatian being third. In the 2007 federal election, the most popular party was the SVP which received 31.2% of the vote. The next three most popular parties were the CVP, the FDP and the Green Party. The historical population is given in the following table:
year
population
1743
1,831
1850
2,346
1860
3,323
1900
4,484
1950
6,992
1960
9,114
1970
14,074
1990
16,147
Education
In Baar about 72% of the population have completed either non-mandatory upper secondary education or additional higher education. Baar is home to the International School of Zug and Luzern, or ISZL. The ISZL is an independent co-educational, non-profit day school, from Pre-School to Grade 12 serving the international community of Central Switzerland. The municipality has a stadium, named Waldmannhalle, with fixed seating for 1,200 people. This regular capacity can be extended to 3,000 for larger events.
Industry
From 1980 to 2006, it was also home to Lego Produktions AG Schweiz, a toy manufacturing plant owned by the Lego Group where some Lego parts, especially those for the Lego Technic building sets, were manufactured. In 2006, the Lego Group announced a restructuring of the current production setup including the outsourcing of some of the production work to Flextronics, a Singaporean electronics company. Lego Produktion AG in Baar was to be shut down and its operations moved to a plant now owned by Flextronics in Kladno, Czech Republic. Lego Technic parts would still be manufactured in the headquarters at Billund, Denmark, which then had a workforce of 3,000. Baar serves as the official headquarters of Glencore, the global producer and trader of commodities, Sika AG, a chemical company with products for construction and automotive, and Veeam, an independent software vendor. Baar has an unemployment rate of 2.26%. , there were 333 people employed in the primary economic sector and about 94 businesses involved in this sector. 3,810 people are employed in the secondary sector and there are 278 businesses in this sector. 9,335 people are employed in the tertiary sector, with 1,415 businesses in this sector. Baar is also home to the Typo3 Association, which moderates the free open source contentmanagement system Typo3.
Transportation
is a stop on the InterRegio service between Zürich Hauptbahnhof and Lucerne, serviced every full hour, as well as on the Zurich S-Bahn service S24 between Zug and Zürich Oerlikon. Several stops of the Stadtbahn Zug are in Baar. In the summer months it is possible to rent free bikes to bike around Baar. This can be done near the Rathaus.
Notable people
Martin Schmid Jesuit, missionary, musician and architect, worked mainly in Bolivia.
