Wild camping at the Flüeseen: the only camping ban in Avers stops at the tree line

One prohibition exists, and it is written for the forest

Graubünden has no cantonal camping ban. That is worth stating plainly, because the canton is large, its communes write their own rules, and a lot of advice online treats the whole of it as one regime. The planning act, the planning ordinance, the nature and heritage act, the police act, the police ordinance, the hunting act and the communal act were each read for Zelt, campieren, Camping, Biwak, Lagern, Übernachten and Wohnwagen. All silent, and each searched against control terms so a zero means silence rather than a failed fetch.⁴

So the answer is communal, and in Avers the commune publishes 27 acts. Twenty-six of them say nothing about camping. The twenty-seventh is the Waldordnung der Gemeinde Avers, and it is the whole of the local law on this question.

"Art. 28 Campieren. Das Campieren im Wald ist verboten."Waldordnung der Gemeinde Avers, art. 28: camping in the forest is forbidden. Art. 27 immediately before it: fire in or near forest is only allowed when there is no elevated forest-fire risk.

Two things follow. The first is that Avers has made a deliberate choice about where camping is a problem, and it chose the forest. The second is that the Flüeseen are nowhere near it. The lakes sit between 2'673 and 2'789 metres, on open alpine shelf, several hundred metres of altitude above the last trees in the valley. A ban written for the wood does not travel uphill.

That finding nearly did not survive the research, which is worth admitting. The Waldordnung is published as a scan with no text layer: run it through an ordinary text extractor and you get eight characters, so it looks like an empty file and reads as silence. It had to be put through optical character recognition to be read at all. Anyone who checks Avers by searching the published PDFs will conclude the commune has no camping rule whatsoever. It has exactly one, and it is in the file that looks blank.²

The commune's Baugesetz of October 2013, the act the cadastre points to for every zone at the lakes, contains no occurrence of any camping word across its 173 articles.³

What the maps say, and the two rules that are not camping rules

Queried at five points across the group on 18 August 2026, every federal inventory returns an empty result: no game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no high or low mire, no mire landscape, no floodplain, no dry meadow of national importance, no amphibian site, no waterbird reserve, no Ramsar site, no Emerald site, no biosphere reserve, no Pro Natura reserve, no forest reserve, no park of national importance. The zero was run with an invalid layer id, which returned HTTP 400 rather than a clean-looking empty answer, and with two positive control points, which returned the Kiental game reserve and the Swiss National Park as they should.¹

The cantonal cadastre of public-law restrictions is where the local detail lives, and it needs care: the parcel here is 11.7 square kilometres, so what applies somewhere on the parcel says nothing about the lakes. Tested point by point, the Flüeseen are outside the Naturschutzzone Flachmoor, the nearest edge 146 metres away, outside the Wald- und Wildruhezone, 375 metres, and outside the cantonal groundwater protection zones, the nearest S3 boundary 71 metres and S1 nearly half a kilometre.⁷

They are inside two zones, and neither is a camping rule, though both get read as one.

The first is a Landschaftsschutzzone, governed by art. 34 of the cantonal planning act: "Neue Bauten und Anlagen sind nicht gestattet", no new buildings and installations. That is a construction rule, and the same is true of art. 41 for the zone the lake surfaces themselves sit in. Nothing in either reaches a tent that is gone by morning.⁴

The second is a Pflanzenschutzzone under art. 25 of the Baugesetz, an area of rare flora, where "das Pflücken, Ausreissen und Ausgraben von Pflanzen" is forbidden. Also not a camping rule. But it is the reason the usual leave-no-trace line is not a platitude at these lakes: the commune has drawn a boundary on the map specifically because of what grows inside it.³

One more, because in Graubünden it is the norm people will quote at you. Art. 13 of the cantonal hunting-operations ordinance is headed "Campieren und Biwakieren" and restricts pitching tents and tarps for the night to marked campsites. Its first four words settle it: "Für die Ausübung der Jagd", for the exercise of hunting. It binds hunters during the hunt, not walkers.⁵

How to do it

Walk in from Juf. Juf is the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Europe at 2'126 m, reachable by PostAuto from Andeer, with parking at the entrance to the village. The path climbs north beside the Müllibach to the Stallerberg at 2'581 m in around two and a half hours, and the lakes are a short traverse on from there. The Obera Flüesee is about 100 metres higher again, and the loop comes back to Juf east of the Foppaspitz.⁸

Do not trust the flattest ground, because it is in the water. This is the standard trap at any lake: the national height model renders a lake as a perfectly flat plane, so a slope scan hands back the middle of it as the best place to sleep. Masked against the actual water outlines, the flattest ground on land in a one-kilometre box is 0.5 degrees at 2'678.4 m, LV95 2'765'740 / 1'147'046, and it lies 111 metres back from the nearest shore. There is a lot of it: more than 1'500 sampled cells sit at least 40 metres back from any water.¹

Stay well back from the shore anyway. Not because a rule says so at these particular lakes, but because five small lakes on one shelf at 2'680 m is exactly the kind of place where everyone camps in the same three spots and the shoreline takes all of it. The scan says you have hundreds of metres of choice. Use them.

No fire. The Waldordnung's fire rule is written for the forest, so it does not bite up here, and that is precisely why the answer has to come from judgement instead: there is nothing to burn at 2'680 m that should be burned, and no way to hide a scar on alpine turf. Bring a gas stove.²

Tread as if the plants are the point, because officially they are. You are inside a zone the commune drew for its rare flora. Pitch on gravel, on worn ground or on short grazed turf, never on a cushion of flowering plants because it looks softer.³

If you want certainty rather than tolerance, ask. One communal instrument could not be read for this report, and the people who hold it are two phone numbers away.

General rules for wild camping

You are on open alpine ground at 2'680 m with no rule against you, in a commune that wrote its one camping ban for the forest and left the mountain alone. That is a lot of trust to be handed:

• 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

Everything here is a journalistic assessment as of August 2026, from the sources linked below, and it is not legal advice.

This report grades the Flüeseen tolerated rather than legal for one specific reason, and it is worth knowing what it is. Article 47 of the commune's constitution assigns an administrative department the handling of a Polizei- und Wirtschaftsordnung der Gemeinde, naming it alongside the Bauordnung and the Waldordnung, both of which the commune publishes. That police ordinance is not among the 27 acts on the commune's website, so it could not be read. Nothing suggests it contains a camping provision; it simply was not available to check.

Art. 28 of the Waldordnung is quoted from an optical character recognition of the commune's published scan, which carries no text layer. The wording was read against control terms, but if a single word matters to you, ask the Gemeindekanzlei for the current file.

Coordinates, slopes, zone boundaries and distances are point samples from the national height model and the cantonal cadastre, not a survey, and the water outlines used to mask the lakes come from open map data. Protection zones are redrawn from time to time. High alpine weather at 2'680 m is its own argument for checking the forecast rather than the 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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