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A little Switzerland or ''Schweiz'' is a landscape, often of wooded hills. This Romantic aesthetic term is not a geographic category, but was widely used in the 19th century to connote dramatic natural scenic features that would be of interest to tourists. Since it was ambiguous from the very beginning, it was flexibly used in travel writing to imply that a landscape had some features, though on a much smaller scale, that might remind a visitor of Switzerland. == Rock outcrops == The original generic term was applied to dozens of locations in Europe, the bulk of them German-speaking, as well as to other parts of the world, to direct attention to rock outcrops that stand out, usually amid steep forest. The original, 18th-century comparison was usually with the fissured crags of the Jura Mountains on the Franco-Swiss border which hardly rise higher than 1700 metres. Histories of Saxon Switzerland (''Sächsische Schweiz'') in Saxony, Germany, assert that the landscape description ''schweiz'' arose there at the end of the 18th century. ''Schweiz'' is the German-language name of Switzerland. The term was used both alone and with the prefix "little", for example in the title of an 1820 German book-length poem, ''Die kleine Schweiz'' by Jakob Reiselsberger,〔Reiselsberger, Jakob; Die kleine Schweiz oder Einladung zur Reise nach Streitberg, Muggendorf, Weischenfeld ()c. und deren Umgebungen; Leitfaden für hieher Reisende, Höhlen-Besucher, Natur- und Alterthums-Freunde, und schön unterhaltendes Taschenbuch für jedermann; () 1820〕 which praised the rocky scenery of a part of Franconia in Germany known thereafter as the Franconian Switzerland (''Fränkische Schweiz''). The term was already colloquial by this time in English: in 1823 a correspondent asserted in ''The Gentleman's Magazine'' that a steep area by the road outside Petersfield in southern England was a little Switzerland.〔''The Gentleman's Magazine'', London; December 1823, page 506〕 The aesthetic term, to describe picturesque exposed rock and steepness rather than altitude, was also in common use in other European languages, including the French term ''Suisse''. Rocks and wild landscapes were a favoured theme in Romantic painting. The many English places praised in 19th-century promotional literature as "little Switzerland" include Church Stretton, Whitfield and the coastal area around the North Devon twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth. Chalet-style buildings were sometimes erected to emphasize little Switzerland pretensions, for example at Matlock Bath, which (unusually for England) also features a cable car. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Little Switzerland (landscape)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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