Wild camping at the Lac de Salanfe

Three levels of law, and none of them says no

Start with the federal layers. Queried on 16 August 2026 at the Lac de Salanfe, 2'562'901 / 1'110'032 in LV95, 46.140752 N / 6.958538 E, at 1'908.5 metres: no federal game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN landscape, no mire landscape, no fen, no raised bog, no amphibian site, no dry meadow, no forest reserve and no building zone. An invalid layer name returns HTTP 400, so those empty answers are answers. Canton Valais, commune Evionnaz.¹

There is exactly one hit, and it is worth being careful about. The point lies in the Parc naturel régional de la Vallée du Trient. That sounds decisive and is not. A regional nature park is a label for a landscape with a development charter, not a protected area with its own camping prohibition. The federal camping provision people sometimes reach for applies to the core zone of a national park, and this is not one.¹

Valais has no cantonal camping rule. Five cantonal acts were read in full with word-boundary matching and control terms that count normally: the act on nature and landscape protection (451.1), the act applying the federal spatial planning act (701.1), the building act (705.1), a fifth act (550.1) and the tourism act (935.1). Across all of them there is not one camping prohibition. The single occurrence of the word in the tourism act is art. 24, which halves the tourist tax for children and for "les exploitants de camping". That is a tax rule, not a ban.²

The commune is where this nearly went wrong. Evionnaz's Règlement communal des constructions et des zones, homologated by the Conseil d'Etat on 10 May 1995, is published as a 43-page scan that machine text extraction reads as 43 characters. Treating that as "no rule found" would have been guessing. Read by OCR it yields 83'033 characters with healthy controls, 94 occurrences of zone and 121 of article, and the camping words do appear seven times.³

Every one of them is harmless. Six belong to art. 10, "Zone de camping-caravaning", a building zone whose purpose is "de permettre l'aménagement cohérent d'une place de camping-caravaning" and which authorises tents, caravans and mobile homes on that designated site. That is the campsite down in the Van valley, not this lake. The seventh is art. 59, on projections over the street, where "les tentes de magasins" are shop awnings. A word search alone would have turned an awning rule into a tent rule.³

The protection zones in the same regulation point the same way. Art. 15, for nature protection zones, prohibits "toutes les interventions nouvelles telles que constructions, installations, travaux de génie civil et rural, modifications de terrains, changements de la couverture du sol, mouvements de terre". Art. 16, for landscape protection zones, prohibits "toute modification sensible du caractère et de l'aspect général du paysage". Both are about building and reshaping ground. Neither mentions sleeping on it.³

The pin is on a reservoir, and the best-looking pitch is a catchment

There is no ground at the pin. Slope reads 0.0 degrees because the point sits inside a water polygon, and a masked scan of 384 samples out to 400 metres returned not a single dry one. That is not an error, it is the size of the lake: Salanfe is a reservoir about 1.6 kilometres long. The scan had to be rerun from 500 to 1'500 metres before land appeared at all.¹

Widened, it found 202 dry samples, 52 of them at 10 degrees or flatter. Three areas stand out, and they are not equal:¹

The plain at the east end is the flattest thing here, 1.4 degrees at 1'919.9 m, about 650 metres northeast of the pin. It is also the one place on this list you should not use, for the reason in the next section.¹

The auberge side, northwest, is almost as good and completely clean: 0.5 degrees at 1'939.6 m about 800 metres out, with 0.9 degrees at 1'940.4 m beside it. This is the shelf the Auberge de Salanfe stands on.¹

The south shore gives 2.0 degrees at 1'914.4 m about 950 metres southwest, with 2.1 and 2.3 degrees nearby. Further from the buildings, and outside the zone that matters.¹

Now the part that decides where you sleep. The official register of public-law restrictions was pulled with geometry for both parcels that carry this basin and tested point in polygon, interior rings honoured so a doughnut-shaped overlay cannot read as a hit, with an invented parcel identifier returning HTTP 204 as a control and a point 60 kilometres away testing outside everything. The result: the east plain lies inside the "Zone de protection des eaux souterraines Sh", 51 metres from its boundary. The south shore is 99 metres outside it, the auberge shelf 441 metres outside, and the pin itself 439 metres outside.⁴

One more thing worth saying because it is the kind of hit that panics people: there is a Zone de protection du paysage on the larger parcel, and it is between 1.0 and 1.9 kilometres away from every candidate above. It does not reach the lake shore. Neither does the second groundwater zone, Sm, at 1.3 kilometres.⁴

How to do it properly here

What the Sh zone actually is. It is a karst groundwater protection zone for the Jorat springs, delimited in a 2017 hydrogeological study. Its own text names this lake: the zone covers the Trias and Malm formations of the Aiguilles Rouges massif "entre le lac de Salanfe et le col du Jorat" and "entre le lac de Salanfe et le col d'Emaney", described as preferential infiltration ground feeding the Jorat captages.⁴

It does not ban camping. The prescriptions run to 39'095 characters with strong controls, 44 occurrences of zone, 61 of protection, 17 of Sh, and zero occurrences of camping, camper, campement, bivouac, tente or caravane. What Sh prohibits is building, the infiltration of waste water, and, as a catch-all, "les installations et des activités qui constituent une menace pour l'utilisation de l'eau potable".⁴

There is one clause in that document that looks like a camping ban and is not. "Stationnement de troupes sans dispositifs sanitaire adéquat interdit en zone Sh" prohibits stationing military troops without adequate sanitary facilities. It is in the "Activités militaires" block, next to shooting ranges and military vehicles. It is not about hikers.⁴

So here is the honest instruction. A tent on the east plain is not illegal. But that ground is a high-vulnerability infiltration zone above somebody's drinking water, the study's own risk list already flags waste water from the hunting cabins and cattle grazing "dans la région de Salanfe", and a buried toilet there is precisely the sort of activity the catch-all is written for. Camp on the south shore or the auberge side instead, both of which are outside the zone and just as flat.⁴¹

Check the line yourself. On map.geo.admin.ch you can display the groundwater protection zones over the national map, and compare the boundary with your phone's GPS position. Fifty-one metres is close enough that you should look rather than guess, and the boundary is not marked in the terrain.⁴

Practical notes. There is no building within 900 metres of the pin, and the nearest is 968 metres away: the Auberge de Salanfe at about 1'950 m, which has a dormitory and rooms if the weather turns, on +41 27 761 14 38 or auberge@salanfe.ch. The approach is on foot: you leave the car after the Van d'en Haut campsite, where the paved road ends, and walk up about an hour and a quarter to the dam.⁵

Carry all water and all rubbish out, no fire, pitch late and strike early, and keep well back from the dam infrastructure. This is a working reservoir as well as a beautiful place.

General rules for wild camping

You are on the shore of a working reservoir at just over 1'900 m, in a regional nature park, with a drinking-water catchment on one side of the lake. That asks for more care than usual:

• 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.

The distances here are point samples from the official geometry, not a survey. Fifty-one metres means the boundary is close, not a line you can pace out. On the ground, check the protection layer against your GPS.

The Evionnaz regulation is published as a scan that machine text extraction reads as 43 characters. The findings above come from an OCR pass over all 43 pages whose control terms count normally, 94 occurrences of zone and 121 of article. That is a genuine read, but it is OCR of a scan, so if a word matters to your decision, open the regulation yourself at the link below. The commune was also running a global revision of its zoning plan and regulation, so check whether a newer version is in force before you rely on the 1995 text.

The Sh zone contains no camping provision, and this article does not claim otherwise. The recommendation to pitch outside it is ours, on the basis of what that zone protects, not a legal obligation we found written down.

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