Wild camping at La Givrine

Which Givrine this is

There are two in the canton. The one meant here is the locality of La Givrine, 1'213.8 m, commune of Saint-Cergue, on the road and the railway between Nyon and La Cure, with the Col de la Givrine about 1.9 km west. The other, in the commune of Le Chenit, lies some 14 km north-north-east. Two communes, so potentially two answers.²

What stands at the exact point matters for the question: the nearest building is 9 metres away, the road 40, the marked path also 40. This is a railway halt with the usual apparatus around it, the trailhead for the Jura's cross-country tracks and footpaths. It is not a quiet corner where a tent goes unnoticed, whatever the law says.²

The commune forbids it, and it took OCR to read that

A note on method, because it changes the status of the answer. Saint-Cergue publishes its regulations as Canon scans with no text layer. An ordinary text extraction pulls twenty-five characters out of them and, more tellingly, zero hits for control words like "article" or "commune". Zero everywhere means the act has not been read, not that it is silent. The documents were therefore put through optical character recognition at 200 dpi; the police regulation comes out at 52'885 characters with healthy control counts, 143 for "article", 53 for "police", 11 for "commune".¹

Under the heading "Camping et caravaning" it says this:

"Article 23 Il est interdit de camper sur le territoire de la Commune, en dehors des endroits autorisés par la municipalité. La municipalité est compétente pour donner les autorisations exceptionnelles."Règlement communal de police de Saint-Cergue, article 23. In English: it is prohibited to camp on the territory of the Commune outside the places authorised by the municipality; the municipality is competent to grant exceptional authorisations. Article 24 adds that storing caravans and other vehicles serving as accommodation is prohibited on communal territory without municipal authorisation.

This is a communal, general prohibition: no altitude, no zone, and it bites on the act of camping itself. It does carry an explicit door, since the municipality is competent to grant exceptional authorisations. The sanction is not quantified in the regulation: its article 8 makes any infringement liable to a fine "dans les limites fixées par la législation sur les sentences municipales", enforcement being the municipality's business.¹

What the rest of the law does not do

The communal building regulation changes nothing for a tent. Also put through OCR, it mentions camping in two places and neither is about a walker: its article 10 admits camping among the tourist facilities of a dedicated zone, and its article 19.4 prohibits "le parcage de roulottes, caravanes et autres logements mobiles pour habitation" outside laid-out places. Those are vehicles and installations, not a night under fabric.⁴

The canton does not ban wild camping. The Vaud camping act defines a camping ground in its article 1 as "l'emplacement aménagé en vue de recevoir régulièrement des installations mobiles servant à l'habitation passagère ou saisonnière, telles que tentes, caravanes": a facility act, and citing it as a bivouac ban would be a mistake. The act on the protection of natural and landscape heritage contains no camping, tent, bivouac or caravan term at all, against healthy control counts.³

And the two labels on this area are not rules either. La Givrine lies in the Parc Jura vaudois, a regional nature park, and in federal landscape inventory object 1022 "Vallée de Joux et Haut-Jura vaudois". A regional park is a label resting on a charter, and the federal landscape inventory binds authorities in performing their tasks. Neither creates a camping prohibition enforceable against an individual.⁵

The ground, for once, is not the problem

This is worth stating because it is unusual in this file and it explains why the question arises. Over an 800 by 800 metre box the median slope is 7.4 degrees and 669 of 961 samples, 70%, fall under 10 degrees. Elevations run from 1'190.0 to 1'289.4 m and the point itself measures 8.3 degrees. This is Jura pasture and woodland, gentle and walkable almost everywhere.²

So what closes the place is not the slope but two ordinary things: you are below the tree line, in a worked and well-travelled landscape, and you are nine metres from a building. A tent here is not invisible; it is in somebody's yard in the broad sense.

What is actually possible here

The clean route is the authorisation. Article 23 provides for it expressly and the municipality is the authority. That is the answer for anyone who genuinely wants to sleep on Saint-Cergue's territory: ask, naming the spot and the date. Contact: Commune de Saint-Cergue, Place Sy-Vieuxville 1, 1264 Saint-Cergue, 022 360 11 46.¹

If the aim is simply a night out in the Jura, the right question is not this point but a point elsewhere, and it is answered exactly as here: identify the commune, read its police regulation, check the federal layers. Neighbouring communes each have their own text, and Saint-Cergue's ban says nothing about the commune next door.

And the honest alternative is a short one. La Givrine is served by train and road, with beds in Saint-Cergue and La Cure minutes away. Doing the day and sleeping under a roof is a real option here rather than a consolation prize: you are not throwing away a three hour approach by skipping the bivouac.

As for the park, its logic is worth following even without binding force: stay on the paths, do not cross fenced pasture, light no fire, leave nothing. That is what keeps a commune's prohibition soft rather than pushing it to harden.⁵

General rules for wild camping

You are in a commune that forbids camping everywhere but kept the power to say yes. That is exactly the kind of rule that hardens when it is abused:

• 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 September 2026, from the sources linked below, and it is not legal advice.

Not allowed rests on two things: a general communal prohibition with an authorisation route attached, and the fact that the point named is a railway halt with a building nine metres away, below the tree line.

Both communal regulations are published as scans with no text layer and were read by optical character recognition at 200 dpi. Control counts are reported with each source, because an unread scan returns zero for the search terms and zero for the control terms alike, which must never be mistaken for silence.

Distances to buildings and roads were measured with the query tolerance calibrated to one pixel per metre and validated against an urban control point. An uncalibrated first pass wrongly reported the nearest building at 1'286 metres.

Frequently asked questions

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.

Swiss Guide Wildcamping Checker Color Grading