As of: 17 August 2026

Wild camping at the Limmernsee

A court order bans camping and bivouacking here, but it covers four named areas up on the Muttsee plateau rather than the whole basin. We read it as the whole basin in July, and that was wrong. The bench that works sits above the lake head, 600 metres below the Muttenchopf.

Leon Helg
Leon Helg · Checked in July 2026, corrected in August 2026 · Updated 17 August 2026
What do these mean?

Illegal A specific rule bans it, usually with a fine, and it can be enforced. Sleep somewhere else.

Not allowed No real place to camp here. A gated site, a developed area, or nowhere sensible to lie down, even if no fine is attached.

It depends You can sleep here, but there's a condition first: ask the landowner, book a spot, stay inside a set zone, or use a bivvy instead of a tent. The report says which.

Tolerated No rule clearly allows or bans it, but a single night is accepted in practice and nobody enforces against it. Normal for high bivouacs above the treeline.

Legal Camping one night is fine here. Either a rule allows it, or we checked every law and found nothing against it. Still: pitch late, leave early, no trace.

What "wild camping" means here: one night. A small tent or a bivvy bag, up towards evening, gone in the morning. Not a base camp, not a camper van. Most Swiss bans are written against camping; whether a single night also falls under them depends on the exact wording, so this article checks that wording. The full difference: wild camping vs bivouacking.

One court order, and it says bivouac out loud

Wild camping at the Limmernsee is not decided by a communal reglement, because canton Glarus does not work that way. It is decided by a civil court order, and the people who obtained it are the two owners of the ground.

The instrument is a gerichtliches Verbot, also called a richterliches Verbot, of the Kantonsgericht Glarus, case ZG.2024.00752, decided on 16 December 2024 and published in the cantonal Amtsblatt on 8 January 2025. The applicants are Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG together with Gemeinde Glarus Süd. It prohibits Campieren, Biwakieren und Drohnen on Grundstücke 772 und 779, Grundbuch Linthal, described as lying in the areas Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf and Muttenwand.1

Three things about this kind of order are worth knowing before you decide anything. It binds everyone, not just the neighbours, which is the whole point of the procedure. It is prosecuted only on the applicant's complaint, so nothing happens automatically. And it can be defeated by anyone who files a written objection with the court within thirty days of publication and posting, without giving reasons. That window opened on 8 January 2025 and closed in February 2025, so for everybody reading this it is shut and the prohibition stands.2

Note the second word in the list. Most of the communal bans we work through are written around tents, caravans and motorhomes, which leaves an untested gap for someone lying in a bivvy bag with nothing pitched. This order names Biwakieren expressly, alongside Campieren. So the tentless night, which is genuinely open in most of canton Bern, has a clean answer here: it is inside the text. The third word, drones, is part of the same order and matters for anyone planning to film.1

"Seit der Sommer-Saison 2025 ist in den Gebieten Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf und Muttenwand ein Camping- und Drohnen Flugverbot in Kraft. [...] Es werden Kontrollen durchgeführt und Zuwiderhandlungen gebüsst."Muttseehütte SAC, current notice, read 30 July 2026: since the 2025 summer season a camping and drone ban has been in force in the areas Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf and Muttenwand; controls are carried out and breaches are fined. The hut is the operator closest to the ground, and its notice is the best evidence that the order is live in the current season.

Now the number, because the wrong one is in circulation. Art. 258 of the Civil Procedure Code lets the court attach a fine of up to CHF 2'000, and that is the ceiling on this order. The CHF 20'000 figure that gets quoted for canton Glarus comes from art. 20 of the cantonal nature protection act, it applies to breaches of a protection provision attached to a specific protected object, and no such object bans camping here. What a camper at the Limmernsee is actually exposed to is CHF 2'000.26

Why it is four areas and not the basin, and where that leaves you

Canton Glarus has no camping act at all. Not in the police act, not in the police ordinance, not in the hunting act or its ordinance, not in the wildlife rest zone ordinance, not in the nature protection act. If you search the cantonal statute book for a camping prohibition you will come away thinking Glarus is wide open, and you will be wrong, because the canton routes camping bans somewhere else entirely.6

The route is written into the cantonal introductory act to the Civil Code: whoever wants a prohibition with a fine attached must apply to the Kantonsgericht, which establishes it and orders publication in the Amtsblatt. That is why the binding rule for this lake is a case number rather than an article number, and it is why this ban is invisible to every map layer. A gerichtliches Verbot is a civil-law instrument, it is not a public-law restriction, and it will never show up on a cadastral extract.23

So what exactly does it cover? The order names two parcels and four areas, and the reading matters. I opened four current gerichtliche Verbote from the same court and the operative clause is always anchored on the parcel, with the address or place name doing nothing but locating it.

"Hiermit wird jedermann verboten, auf der Liegenschaft Nr.315, Grundbuch Bilten, Gemeinde Glarus Nord, Hauptstrasse 33/35, 8865 Bilten, Fahrzeuge aller Art abzustellen."Gerichtliches Verbot ZG.2026.00456, Amtsblatt des Kantons Glarus, published 1 July 2026. One of four current orders from the same court read for the template. In each of them the prohibition attaches to the parcel and the place name is a locator, not a limit.

That is the reading we published in July, and it is wrong. Run it and the order covers parcels 772 and 779 together, about 63 square kilometres, a strip fifteen kilometres across. That is not what a hotspot measure looks like, and three things break it outright.

First, two of the four named areas are not on either parcel. I re-ran the cadastre as true point queries, zero tolerance, with an invalid-layer control that returns HTTP 400 rather than an empty set. Muttenalp comes back as parcel 20004 and the Muttseehütte as 20017. The order names Muttenalp expressly. An order whose scope was really the two parcels could not reach it, so the four Gebiete are doing operative work and the parcels are identifying whose land it is.3

Second, the applicant says so. Gemeinde Glarus Süd, one of the two parties that went to court, has stated in public that it deliberately chose three heavily frequented areas, the Muttenchopf, the Oberblegisee and the Panixerpass, and did not want a general ban. The other two already had their own orders before this one.7

Third, there is a map. Art. 259 of the Civil Procedure Code requires the prohibition to be posted on the land, and that posting is what makes it binding on people who were never party to the case. The Muttseehütte says the affected area is signalled on a map on site. A delimited perimeter drawn on a board is not how you publish a 63 square kilometre ban, it is how you publish a hotspot.4

Here is the honest part, and it is one sentence. I could not re-read the order's own text. The online Amtsblatt keeps only a handful of gerichtliche Verbote in its live listing and the January 2025 publication has aged out of it, which I confirmed rather than assumed by running the same date lookup against a publication I know is still listed. So the case details above rest on our own earlier Amtsblatt research, and the parcel-wide reading of the scope is a well-supported inference from four same-court templates, not a quotation of the operative clause. A signed copy can be requested from the Kantonsgericht Glarus in one letter, and if it ever contradicts this we will say so here.1

What the uncertainty does mean is that the board beats this page. The four areas are certain, the Muttenchopf is inside them on any reading, and the southern limit of the drawn perimeter is something only the map up there can tell you. Treat everything below as where to start looking, not as a licence.5

Inside the four areas the consent route is closed rather than unexplored. Glarus tourism guidance tells you that permission from the landowner is needed in every case. Fine, except that art. 258 of the Civil Procedure Code lets only a person with a real right in the land apply for a prohibition like this one, and the applicants here are the two landowners themselves. Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG holds the reservoir parcel, Gemeinde Glarus Süd the surrounding one. That is consent withheld in the most formal way Swiss law provides, not consent pending. We also looked for the usual word-of-mouth arrangement, an alp tenant, a number to call, a customary few francs, the way there is in the Alpstein. For the ground inside the order there is none, and saying so plainly is better than implying a door exists. Outside it you are back to the ordinary Swiss position, above the tree line, one night, landowner's consent as courtesy rather than as a gate.27

One practical consequence: if you meet a sign up here, it is the real kind. A genuine court prohibition names the court, carries a date and a case number and states a franc amount, and this one does all three.2

The pin is under water, and the one bench that works

The requested point is LV95 2'720'127 / 1'188'415, WGS84 46.836037 / 9.013369, terrain height 1'834.2 metres. The federal water-body layer returns the standing-water polygon "Limmerensee" there. To put a number on how far under the surface that is, I sampled 120 points along the mapped lake boundary: the median comes out at 1'855.2 metres, consistent with the scheme's 1'857 metre full-supply level. The pin is about twenty-one metres below it. It is a gazetteer label sitting at the middle of the lake, on ground that is submerged whenever the reservoir is anywhere near full.5

Worth saying because it changes how you read the shore: this is a pumped-storage basin in the Linthal 2015 scheme. The level moves fast and it moves far. Ground that looks like a dry gravel bench in the evening can be under water within hours, which is its own reason not to sleep near the waterline even before anyone mentions the law.

So where could you actually pitch? In July I ran a 100 metre terrain grid, found nothing usable above the waterline and wrote that there was nowhere to sleep. A 100 metre cell averages a tent out of existence, and a reader who had just camped at the lake said so. Re-run at 25 metres, 2'205 points over the lake head and the shore benches, with the reservoir surface masked at 1'834.2 metres, and 57 land cells come back at 25 per cent slope or less. They are not scattered, they form one bench.5

LV95 2'720'275 / 1'189'500 · WGS84 46.84577 / 9.01559 · about 1'873 metresThe bench above the north end of the lake. Slope 6 to 17 per cent across the core cells, roughly 16 metres above full supply, 650 metres south of the Muttenchopf summit and 600 metres below it, 459 metres from the lake head. Parcel 779, no federal inventory on it, and outside all four named areas.

The places a person would realistically consider, and where each falls:

  • The bench above the lake head, about 1'873 metres. Outside the four named areas, and the only ground at this destination that is both flat enough and clear of the order. This is the answer.
  • The Muttenchopf terraces, about 2'370 metres, 1.73 kilometres north of the pin. The viewpoint that filled with tents, up to thirty a day at the peak, and the reason the order exists. Named Gebiet Muttenkopf. Inside the ban on any reading.
  • The Muttsee plateau, around 2'470 metres. The other genuinely flat ground in the basin, and Muttenalp and Muttenwändli are both named. Inside.
  • Anywhere near the waterline. Legally fine, physically a bad idea, see the drawdown above.

Everything else at this pin is empty, and the empties were checked properly. No federal inventory reaches it: no game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN object, no mire, floodplain or amphibian object, each query run alongside an invalid-layer control that errors rather than returning an empty set. On the cantonal side, nine nature protection and forest layers come back empty, and two positive controls in the same request pattern do return features, so the empties are genuine absences rather than a query artefact.56

The Kärpf question, because people ask it. The oldest game reserve in Europe runs over the ridge to the north-east, and its nearest boundary is 4'029 metres from the pin. It does not reach the Limmernsee, and the federal tent ban that applies inside game reserves is not what stops you here.5

One last detail that explains why this ban is so easy to miss. The public-law restriction extracts for both parcels contain nothing about camping at all: parcel 779 carries a single contaminated-sites entry over 0.2 percent of its area, parcel 772 five small forest-reserve fragments. That is the expected result, not a contradiction. A gerichtliches Verbot is never registered as a public-law restriction, which is precisely why this one has to be found in the Amtsblatt and why no map will ever show it to you.3

  • The bench above the lake head, about 1'873 metres, LV95 2'720'275 / 1'189'500. Outside the four named areas. Pitch late, leave early, stay off the waterline.5
  • Muttseehütte SAC, on the trail at Muttenalp above the lake, 76 beds, +41 55 643 32 12, mail@muttseehuette.ch. The answer if you want to be high on this ridge for sunrise, and the same operator whose notice tells you the ban is being controlled.4
  • Basecamp Panixerpass, in the next valley, which is the commune's own sanctioned tent alternative and exists because of exactly this problem.7
  • Campsites down in the Linth valley, if you are driving in and want a base for the cable car day.
  • Not the Muttenchopf terraces, which is the one place people mean when they ask about this lake, and the one place the order was written for. Walk up for the sunrise, sleep below it.
  • No drones in any of the four named areas. Same order, same fine.

General rules for wild camping

This applies on the ground below the order, and it matters more here than usual. Thirty tents a day on one viewpoint is what turned a tolerated place into a court order, and the ground outside the perimeter keeps its status only as long as it does not become the next hotspot. It is not legal text, but decency and common sense, and it is worth remembering that thirty tents a day on one viewpoint is what turned a tolerated place into a court order.

  • 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.

One limit stated openly: the text of the court order could not be re-read, because the publication has aged out of the online Amtsblatt listing and the archive search was returning server errors when this correction was written. The four named areas are certain and the Muttenchopf is inside them on any reading; the exact southern limit of the drawn perimeter is not something this article can settle, which is why it tells you to read the board on site. Beyond that, court prohibitions can be obtained, extended or lifted at any time, and Gemeinde Glarus Süd has had a camping reglement of its own in preparation. Before every tour, check the current sources yourself, read any sign on site properly, and follow instructions given to you there. 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.

Frequently asked questions

Is wild camping allowed at the Limmernsee?
It depends where. A gerichtliches Verbot of the Kantonsgericht Glarus, obtained in December 2024 by Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG together with Gemeinde Glarus Süd, prohibits camping, bivouacking and drone flights in four named areas: Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf and Muttenwand. They sit on the Muttsee plateau and the ridge, 1.0 to 2.6 km north of the shore, and the perimeter is drawn on a board on site. The Muttenchopf is inside it. The bench at about 1'873 m above the north end of the lake, 650 m south of and 600 m below the viewpoint, is not. Read the board before you choose a spot.
What is the fine, and is it really CHF 20'000?
CHF 2'000, and no. Art. 258 of the Civil Procedure Code caps a court prohibition of this kind at CHF 2'000, and prosecution depends on the applicant filing a complaint. The CHF 20'000 that circulates for canton Glarus is art. 20 of the cantonal nature protection act, which needs a protection provision attached to a specific protected object, and no such object bans camping at the Limmernsee. The Muttseehütte's notice states that controls are run and breaches are fined, so the CHF 2'000 is not theoretical.
Does the ban catch a bivouac without a tent, or a drone?
Both, expressly. The order prohibits Campieren, Biwakieren and drones in the same sentence. That is unusual and it closes the gap that makes so many communal camping bans arguable: a sleeping bag with nothing pitched is named in the text, not merely arguably covered by it. The drone ban applies across the same four named areas, which matters if you were planning to film the lake.
Can I just ask the landowner?
Inside the four areas, there is nobody left to ask. Under art. 258 of the Civil Procedure Code only a person with a real right in the land can apply for such a prohibition, and here the applicants are the two landowners: Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG for the reservoir parcel and Gemeinde Glarus Süd for the surrounding one. Going to court is consent refused in the most formal way available, not consent left unasked. We also looked for the usual informal arrangement, an alp tenant, a number, a customary fee. For this basin there is none.
Is the Muttenchopf covered too, or only the lake?
The Muttenchopf is the part that is certain. The terraces at about 2'370 metres are the viewpoint that filled with tents and prompted the order, and Muttenkopf is one of the four areas it names, so it is inside on any reading. The lake shore is the other way round: it is more than a kilometre south of the nearest named area and several hundred metres below it, which is why this article now treats the bench above the lake head as outside. If the map on the board says otherwise, the board wins.
Is it Limmernsee or Limmerensee?
Both, and it is the same lake. The federal gazetteer and the swisstopo map write Limmerensee. Almost every hiking page, the cable car and the local usage write Limmernsee. It is the reservoir above Linthal in Glarus Süd, part of the Linthal 2015 pumped-storage scheme, with a full-supply level of about 1'857 metres and the Muttsee a further 600 metres higher behind it.
Leon Helg

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

Sources

  1. Gerichtliches Verbot, Kantonsgericht Glarus, case ZG.2024.00752, decided 16 December 2024 and published in the Amtsblatt des Kantons Glarus on 8 January 2025 on the application of Kraftwerke Linth-Limmern AG together with Gemeinde Glarus Süd: prohibits Campieren, Biwakieren und Drohnen on Grundstücke 772 und 779, Grundbuch Linthal, in den Gebieten Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf und Muttenwand, Busse bis CHF 2'000, auf Antrag. Recorded from the Amtsblatt in our earlier Glarus research and published alongside its sibling orders in wild camping at the Klöntalersee. Stated limit: the publication could not be re-read on 30 July 2026 because the online Amtsblatt keeps only a handful of gerichtliche Verbote in its live listing and this one has aged out; the same date-lookup route was validated against a publication that is still listed, so the empty result is real rather than a failed query. The operative-clause reading in this article is therefore an inference from four current orders of the same court, ZG.2026.00456, ZG.2026.00462, ZG.2026.00353 and ZG.2026.00119, in each of which the prohibition attaches to the named parcel and the place name is a locator. amtsblatt.gl.ch. ↩
  2. The statutory frame. Swiss Civil Procedure Code (ZPO), SR 272, art. 258 para. 1: a person with a real right in a parcel may apply to the court for an order that any disturbance of possession be desisted from and that a breach be punished, on complaint, with a fine of up to CHF 2'000. Art. 259: the prohibition is published and posted on the land. Art. 260 para. 1 and 2: a written objection within 30 days of publication and posting, which needs no reasons, renders the prohibition ineffective against the objector, and enforcement then requires an action before the court. Cantonal implementing rule, Einführungsgesetz zum ZGB Glarus, GS III B/1/1, art. 146 para. 3, under the heading on the right of access and defence under art. 699 ZGB: whoever wishes to issue a prohibition must apply to the Kantonsgericht, which establishes it with a penalty provision and orders publication in the Amtsblatt. fedlex.admin.ch · gesetze.gl.ch. ↩
  3. Cadastre, queried 30 July 2026 through the canton's own public-law restrictions webservice and the federal cadastre availability layer, as true point queries with zero tolerance. Parcel 779, EGRID CH832277690424, Grundbuchkreis Linthal, Gemeinde Glarus Süd, 7'718'879 m² = 771.9 ha, extent E 2'718'265 to 2'721'379 and N 1'186'399 to 1'192'899. Parcel 772, EGRID CH227858226914, same Grundbuchkreis, 55'358'178 m² = 5'535.8 ha. Point queries: the requested pin, the north-end shore benches, the Limmern dam, the south-end inflow ground, the Muttenchopf summit, Muttenwand, the Muttsee dam and the Muttsee itself all return parcel 779; Muttenalp with the Muttseehütte, Muttenwändli, the east slope above the lake, the west ridge and the Chalchtrittli access area return 772. The only sampled point outside both was on the far side of the south-east ridge. Public-law restriction extracts: parcel 779 carries one entry, a contaminated-sites register record over 14'292 m², which is 0.2 percent of the parcel; parcel 772 carries five forest-reserve fragments of the Waldreservat Sand totalling about 3 ha. Neither extract mentions camping, which is expected, because a gerichtliches Verbot is a civil-law instrument and is never registered as a public-law restriction. map.geo.gl.ch. ↩
  4. Muttseehütte SAC Winterthur, current notice, read 30 July 2026: "Seit der Sommer-Saison 2025 ist in den Gebieten Muttenwändli, Muttenalp, Muttenkopf und Muttenwand ein Camping- und Drohnen Flugverbot in Kraft" and "Es werden Kontrollen durchgeführt und Zuwiderhandlungen gebüsst." The hut has 76 beds, sits at Muttenalp on the trail above the lake, +41 55 643 32 12, mail@muttseehuette.ch. Note that the notice names the four Gebiete and not the lake shore; the shore is reached through the parcel rather than through the area names. Operator information, not a legal source. muttseehuette.ch. ↩
  5. Terrain and federal geodata, queried 30 July 2026 at LV95 2'720'127 / 1'188'415. The federal water-body layer returns the standing-water polygon "Limmerensee" at the pin; terrain height 1'834.2 m; 120 points sampled along the mapped lake boundary give a median shoreline of 1'855.2 m, p10 1'853.5 m, p90 1'858.0 m, consistent with the scheme's 1'857 m full-supply level, so the pin lies about 21 m below it. Lake area 1.34 km². Slope analysis from a 100 m grid of 1'209 points over E 2'718'600 to 2'721'600 and N 1'186'600 to 1'190'400 using the federal height API: above the full-supply line and within 2.5 km of the pin, exactly one cell has a slope below 12 degrees and local relief below 12 m, and it lies at 2'589 m beyond the south-east ridge outside both parcels. Federal inventories at the pin are empty, each query run with an invalid-layer control that returns an error rather than an empty set: no game reserve, wildlife rest zone, BLN, mire, raised-bog, floodplain, amphibian or dry-meadow object, no park of national importance. Nearest federal game reserve, computed as true minimum boundary distance: Kärpf, object 12, integral protection, 4'029 m north-east. api3.geo.admin.ch. ↩
  6. What does not apply. Canton Glarus has no camping act: checked against the police act and police ordinance, the introductory act to the Criminal Code, the hunting act and hunting ordinance, the wildlife rest zone ordinance and the cantonal nature protection act, none of which contains a camping provision. The CHF 20'000 figure that circulates for Glarus is art. 20 of the Naturschutzgesetz, GS IV G/1/1, which punishes breaches of protection provisions attached to specific protected objects and is not engaged at this lake. Cantonal map layers queried 30 July 2026 through the cantonal WMS with zero polygon tolerance: nature reserve perimeters and zones, wildlife rest zones, national and cantonal biotopes, forest reserves, high-altitude biotope mapping and the surveyed forest perimeter all return empty at the pin, while two positive controls in the same request pattern, the binding land-use zone and the cantonal landscape inventory, do return features, so the empty results are genuine absences. The landscape inventory entry is binding on authorities under the cantonal nature protection act and is not a camping ban. Gemeinde Glarus Süd had a Campierreglement announced for 2026; its own website is unreachable to automated clients and the reglement was still unpublished when the cantonal collection was last checked, so it is not relied on here, and it could only reinforce this verdict. gesetze.gl.ch. ↩
  7. Context and alternatives, secondary sources, not a basis for the verdict. VISIT Glarnerland's wild camping page carries the cantonal tourism line, including the statement that the landowner's permission is required in every case, and lists "Muttenkopf und Umgebung Muttsee/Limmeren" among the places where camping is not wanted. Regional and national reporting from 4 September 2024, 25 July 2024 and 7 April 2025 documents the tent counts at the Muttenchopf, the CHF 2'000 figure, the commune's media release of 27 June 2024 and the reasons the commune and the power company went to court. Basecamp Panixerpass is the commune's own sanctioned tent alternative in the next valley. glarnerland.ch · basecamp-panixerpass.ch. ↩