Wild camping at the Baschalvasee: the ban is a ring 14 metres wide

One communal article, and it names lying up

Wild camping at the Baschalvasee is decided at the communal level, and the useful part is that the rule is precise rather than sweeping.

Federal, first. Queried at the lake on 12 August 2026, LV95 2'749'216 / 1'206'695, WGS84 46.994528 N / 9.400543 E, surface 2'173.5 m: no federal game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN landscape, no mire, floodplain, dry-meadow or amphibian object, no forest reserve, no park of national importance. A positive control at 2'626'000 / 1'154'500 returns federal game reserve no. 3 Kiental, so the layers answer, and an invalid-layer control returns HTTP 400 rather than an empty set. That last one matters more than it sounds: without it, a typo reads exactly like an all-clear.¹

Cantonal. St. Gallen has no camping prohibition of general application. That is not an assumption: eleven cantonal acts were read in full for this site's Gonzen report, including the Polizeigesetz, the Polizeiverordnung and the Übertretungsstrafgesetz, which is the natural home for such an offence, and none of them prohibits camping, tenting or bivouacking.⁴

Communal, and here it is. Vilters-Wangs has no police regulation and no camping regulation. What it has is a Schutzverordnung, and one article of it does all the work:²

"Zusätzlich zu den Vorschriften der Naturschutzverordnung sind verboten: ... das Zelten, Campieren, Lagern und Feuern, ausser auf den bewilligten Arealen."Gemeinde Vilters-Wangs, Schutzverordnung, Ausgabe 2016 of 24 May 2016, art. 11 "Schutzgebiet entlang des Rheins sowie für Bergseen und Bäche", applying to the areas designated on the Plan zur Schutzverordnung.

Read the verbs. Zelten is pitching a tent. Campieren is camping. Lagern is lying up, and that is the one that closes the usual escape route: at many Swiss spots a rule written against tents leaves a bivvy bag arguable, and here it does not. All four verbs sit in the same sentence, with one exception carved out for authorised areas, and there is no authorised area at this lake.²

The penalty. Art. 19 of the same ordinance: whoever contravenes its provisions is punished with Haft oder Busse, and both intentional and negligent contraventions are punishable. Enforcement is the Gemeinderat's job under art. 18, and it may appoint wardens for the protected areas. There is no published tariff, so I am not going to invent a number for you.²

The ban is a ring, and here is where it ends

Art. 11 only bites "in den im Plan zur Schutzverordnung bezeichneten Gebieten", so everything turns on where that area is drawn. The cadastre of public-law restrictions answers that with geometry rather than colour, which is the only way to answer it honestly.

The extract for the parcel under the lake, EGRID CH187759007726, parcel 35, 11'280'372 m², lists 284 restrictions. At the exact coordinate, the shore designation is Uferschutzgebiet UfS, legally in force, responsible office the Gemeinde Vilters-Wangs, and it is drawn as a donut with two rings: an outer boundary enclosing 10'064 m² and an inner one enclosing 4'648 m², the inner one being the water itself. Subtract and you get a shore band of roughly 5'400 m².³

And the ground rule this site prints in every article is already wider than that. Fifty metres from any water is what we ask for anyway, for the plain reason that people and cattle drink it. Keep that distance at the Baschalvasee and you have walked out of the Uferschutzgebiet on every bearing, without needing a map. That is a rare and pleasant alignment between a legal perimeter and ordinary decency, and it is the practical answer to this whole article.

What you are standing in once you are out. The designation past the band is Lebensraum Kerngebiet, art. 10 of the same ordinance. It forbids activities that diminish the quality of habitats of threatened species, and it lists what it means: large tourist and sporting events, off-piste skiing in the forest, mountain biking away from permitted paths, motorbikes off roads, buildings that impede animal movement, harmful farming and forestry, tourist installations, new access roads. There is no camping clause in it. The drafters plainly knew how to write one, because they wrote one in art. 11, and they did not repeat it here.²

If you want a measured spot rather than a rule of thumb: the flattest ground outside the band and more than fifty metres from the water is 1.1 degrees at 2'157 m, LV95 2'749'480 / 1'206'660, WGS84 46.994154 / 9.404001, about 208 m east of the water. A second option runs 1.2 degrees at 2'127 m to the north, and a higher one 1.9 degrees at 2'282 m to the west.⁵

The lake next door is a federal offence

The Baschalvasee is the northernmost of the Pizol five lakes, and the five are usually walked in a day, which is exactly why this needs saying: they are not one legal place.

The Wildsee, 2.73 km south, lies inside federal game reserve no. 15 Graue Hörner. Inside a federal reserve, free tenting and camping is an offence under federal hunting law, tariffed as a fixed penalty of CHF 150, and no landowner can permit an exception, only the canton. From the Baschalvasee the nearest edge of that reserve is 2'158 metres, so you are well clear here, but a camper who reads "the Pizol lakes" as one answer will get it wrong at the far end of the walk.¹⁶

And the same commune is not uniform either. Vilters-Wangs draws the identical Uferschutzgebiet on the Schwarzsee, 1'049 m south of this lake, and draws none at all on the Wangsersee, 2.47 km south-east, which is why a night there is lawful and a night on this shore is not. The plan distinguishes lake by lake, and so should you.³⁷

Reference points, all measured from the lake: Pizolhütte 2.12 km south-east, Schottensee 2.13 km south, Wangsersee 2.47 km south-east, Wildsee 2.73 km south, Pizol summit 4.07 km south. The normal approach is the Pizolbahnen from Wangs and then the five-lakes walk.⁸

Where you can legally sleep

• More than fifty metres from the water, which puts you outside the Uferschutzgebiet on every bearing and in the Lebensraum Kerngebiet, where no camping rule applies³.
• The measured spot: 2'157 m, LV95 2'749'480 / 1'206'660, 1.1 degrees, about 208 m east of the water⁵.
• Not on the bank itself, anywhere around the lake, because that is the strip art. 11 covers, and it catches a bivvy bag as well as a tent².
• Not at the Wildsee, 2.73 km south, which is inside a federal game reserve and a different order of problem¹.

General rules for wild camping

At this lake the first item on the list is also the legal answer, which does not happen often. The rest is the usual, and it is what keeps a place like this from getting a stricter rule than the one it already has.

• No fire. An open fire has no place in the mountains. A gas stove is enough.
• Pitch late, strike early. Set up towards evening, gone again early. A bivouac is one night, not a base camp.
• Leave no rubbish. Everything you carry up you carry down, organic scraps and toilet paper included.
• At least 50 metres from any water for the big business, so you do not foul what people and livestock drink.
• Stay small and quiet. A small group, no speaker, no drone, dogs on the lead, and the alp staff's word goes.

Disclaimer

This article reflects my research and assessment to the best of my knowledge, as of August 2026. It is based on the publicly accessible and official sources linked below. It does not replace legal advice and is not a binding statement of the current legal situation.

The verdict rests on a communal ordinance and on the perimeter its plan draws, both of which the commune can change, and on a cadastral extract read on 12 August 2026. The band measurements are taken from that geometry and are accurate to the data, not to a surveyor's peg on the ground, so leave yourself margin rather than pacing out fourteen metres. Before every tour, check the current sources yourself and follow the signs on site. A genuine emergency bivouac in distress is a separate question from a planned camp. Anyone who spends the night outside bears responsibility for their own conduct and any consequences themselves. Hikebeast, Leon Helg and Saftladen GmbH accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of this text, and call on no one to break applicable law.

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Leon Helg

Swiss filmmaker and software developer. Spends his free time in the Swiss Alps and maps his favourite spots for Hikebeast. Posts as @leon.helg on Instagram and TikTok.

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