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|This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia. (December 2008)|
|— Department —|
|Prefecture building of the Bas-Rhin department, in Strasbourg|
|• President of the General Council||Guy-Dominique Kennel (UMP)|
|• Total||4,755 km2 (1,836 sq mi)|
|• Density||230/km2 ( 590/sq mi)|
|Time zone||CET (UTC+1)|
|• Summer (DST)||CEST (UTC+2)|
|^1 French Land Register data, which exclude estuaries, and lakes, ponds, and glaciers larger than 1 km2|
Bas-Rhin (French pronunciation: [bɑ.ʁɛ̃]; Alsatian: Unterelsàss) is a department of France. The name means "Lower Rhine". It is the more populous and densely populated of the two departments of the Alsace region, with 1,079,013 inhabitants in 2006.
Bas-Rhin is one of the original 83 departments created on 4 March 1790, during the French Revolution.
In the mid-1790s, following the French occupation of the entire left bank of the Rhine, the northern boundary of the department was extended north beyond the Lauter to the Queich river to include the areas of Annweiler am Trifels, Landau in der Pfalz, Bad Bergzabern, and Wörth am Rhein. However, upon Napoleon's second defeat in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reassigned the areas north of the Lauter to Bavaria; and those territories are now presently located in the neighbouring German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The department has twice been incorporated into Germany: from 1871 (after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War) until the end of World War I in 1918, and again briefly during World War II (from 1940 to 1945) during the German occupation of France.
To the north of Bas-Rhin lies the Palatinate forest (Pfälzerwald) in the German State of Rhineland-Palatinate, and the German State of Baden-Württemberg lies to the east. To the south lies the department of Haut-Rhin, the town of Colmar and southern Alsace, and to the west the department of Moselle in Lorraine. On its south-western corner, Bas-Rhin also joins the department of Vosges.
A contrasting climate 
The Bas-Rhin has a continental-type climate, characterised by cold, dry winters and hot, stormy summers, due to the western protection provided by the Vosges Mountains. However, the Alsatian climate is less continental than that of Burgundy. The average annual temperature is 10.4°C in the lowlands (Entzheim) and 7°C on high ground. The annual maximum temperature is high (30°C). The average rainfall is 700 mm/year.
Climate records 
Established according to data from Météo-France station Strasbourg-Entzheim (the airport), over the period since 1923.
|Lowest temperature||-23,6 °C|
|Coldest year||1956 (8,8°C)|
|Highest temperature||38,5 °C|
|Hottest year||2000 (12,1°C)|
|Highest 24-hour rainfall||65,6 mm|
|Wettest day||29 May 1935|
|Wettest year||1987 (811,1mm)|
|Dryest year||1949 (392,6mm)|
Alsace and the adjacent Moselle department have a legal system slightly different from the rest of France. The statutes in question date from the period 1871 - 1919 when the area was part of the German Empire. With the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1919, Paris accepted that Alsace and Moselle should retain some local laws in respect of certain matters, especially with regard to hunting, economic life, local government relationships, health insurance and social rights. It includes notably the absence of any formal separation between church and state: several mainstream denominations of the Christian church benefit from state funding, in contrast to principles applied in the rest of France.
Church of Niederhaslach
See also 
- Communes of the Bas-Rhin department sorted by arrondissements and cantons
- Communities of Communes of the Bas-Rhin département
- Arrondissements of the Bas-Rhin département
- Cantons of the Bas-Rhin département
- (French) General Council website
- (French) Prefecture website
- (English) Bas-Rhin at the Open Directory Project