Wild camping at the Oberblegisee: nobody banned it, and you still should not
I went looking for the rule that closes this lake and there is not one. No federal ban, no cantonal ban, no communal ban. That is a real answer and it deserves to be said first, because most articles about Swiss lakes imply a prohibition that nobody ever wrote. What the Oberblegisee has instead is a protected breeding site in the water, a working alp on the only flat ground, and an altitude that quietly removes your best argument.
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.
I looked for the ban. There is no ban.
Wild camping at the Oberblegisee is not prohibited by any instrument I can find, and I checked all three levels that could have done it.
The canton. Glarus is one of the Swiss cantons that has simply never legislated on sleeping outdoors. The introductory act to the Civil Code, the cantonal fixed-penalty ordinance and the act on nature and heritage protection were read in full, and none of them contains Campieren, Zelt, Biwak or Übernachten as a whole word. The fixed-penalty ordinance is the telling one: in a canton that tariffs minor offences from a published catalogue, an offence that appears nowhere in that catalogue is an offence nobody is being fined for.6
The commune. Glarus Süd publishes twelve acts through its chancellery and not one of them is a police regulation or a camping regulation. That is not an accident of filing. The commune's actual instrument against wild camping is a judicial prohibition under art. 258 of the Civil Procedure Code, posted as a sign on communal land and backed by a fine of up to CHF 2'000, and the places it has used it are the Muttenchopf and the Muttsee-Limmern area. The Oberblegisee is not among them.5
The building ordinance, and which one is actually in force. This matters more than it sounds. Glarus Süd was assembled from twenty-five communes and it still runs on their pre-merger building ordinances; the unified Baureglement was, when I wrote this, a December 2024 draft in its second round of public consultation, which is not law. The act that governs this ground is therefore the Bauordnung Luchsingen of 28 May 2004: 39 pages, 131 articles, and zero occurrences of Zelt, Campieren, Camping, Biwak, Übernachten or Nächtigen, against control terms that return 131 hits for "Art." and 122 for "Zone", so the scan is sound rather than empty.4
"Wohnwagen, Wohnmobile und Schiffe etc., die pro Jahr insgesamt mehr als zwei Monate auf der gleichen Liegenschaft stehen, gelten als Gebäude."Bauordnung Luchsingen, 28 May 2004, art. 34 para. 1.
Read that article and you can see the drafters thinking about exactly this problem. They addressed temporary shelter: caravans, motorhomes, boats. Over two months on the same property and the thing counts as a building; under two months but regularly, and you need the council's permission. They had the topic in their hands and they wrote about vehicles. A tent for one night is not in it, and I am not going to stretch a caravan rule over a bivvy bag.4
So the legal answer is: permitted, subject to the landowner. Which at the Oberblegisee means subject to an alp, and that is where the article stops being about law.
The map lies about this lake
Here is the part I did not expect, and it changed my recommendation.
Ask the terrain model for flat ground and it hands you the lake. The federal elevation model renders standing water as a single flat plane, so a naive slope scan around the Oberblegisee returns beautiful 0.0-degree ground at 1'420.0 metres, which is the surface of the water. Of 1'089 samples on a 20-metre grid, 391 fall inside the lake polygon. Filtering by elevation is not enough either: there is a shelf reading 1'419.9 metres, one decimetre under the plane, and it is still lake. The only honest way to do this is to mask by the actual water polygon.7
Masked properly, the good ground walks away from the water. The flattest genuinely dry ground is 0.9 degrees at 1'425.1 metres, LV95 2'719'972 / 1'204'697, which is 316 metres north-east of the lake and 88 metres back from the shore. Two things follow. It is 61 metres outside the amphibian inventory perimeter, which is the one piece of good news. And it is 108 metres from the nearest registered building of the alp Oberblegi, which is not.78
Four buildings, and they are on the register. The federal building and dwelling register lists Oberblegi 2, 3, 3a and 3b, between 361 and 453 metres from the lake: one in the dwelling class and three agricultural. The flat ground I just described sits between 108 and 137 metres from three of them. In plain terms, the only place at this lake where you could comfortably pitch is an alp's working yard, in sight of its doors, and the person whose yard it is has not been asked.8
And the altitude quietly removes your best argument. The Alpine Club's guidance for a single considerate night is framed for ground above the treeline and outside protected areas. The Oberblegisee is at 1'420 metres, comfortably below the treeline in Glarus, so that tolerance does not reach it. Below the treeline you are on farmed, forested or grazed ground that belongs to somebody, and the answer comes from them rather than from a general principle.9
What the water is for. The lake is object GL37 of the federal inventory of amphibian spawning sites of national importance. That inventory obliges the canton to protect the object; it is not a tent article aimed at you, and I am not going to dress it up as one. But it does tell you what the shoreline is: a breeding site, listed nationally, where the animals that matter are in the shallows exactly during the warm months you would want to sleep there.2
The place
Lake: WGS84 46.980188 N / 9.013187 E, LV95 2'719'791 / 1'204'437, 1'420.0 m on the federal terrain model, commune of Glarus Süd, locality Luchsingen, canton Glarus, on the shelf under the Bösbächistock high above the Linth valley. The public-law cadastre puts it on parcel 322, an alpine parcel of 3'251'368 m², and returns no restriction theme at all at this point, which is itself worth knowing: there is no communal overlay here to read.3
What the federal sweep returns is one hit and a long row of blanks. Amphibian inventory: object GL37, Oberblegisee. Game reserves, wildlife rest zones, the BLN landscape inventory, raised bogs, fens, mire landscapes, floodplains, dry meadows and parks of national importance: empty, every one. Those blanks were checked the way blanks have to be checked, against a positive control that returns game reserve no. 3 Kiental and an invalid-layer control that errors with HTTP 400 instead of quietly coming back empty.1
One thing I will not pretend to know: whether the alp minds. I have not spoken to them and I am not going to invent a temperament for people I have not met. What I can tell you is that on this ground the question is theirs to answer, not the canton's, and that walking up to ask is a very short conversation compared to the alternative.
Where you can legally sleep
- Here, in principle, with the alp's permission: no norm forbids the night, so the ground belongs to whoever owns it, and Oberblegi is who you ask4.
- Not on the shoreline, whatever the law says: the water is a nationally listed amphibian breeding site and the shallows are the point of it2.
- Not in the alp yard 316 m north-east, which is the only flat dry ground and is 108 m from a registered building7.
- Higher up and out of the basin, above the treeline and away from the inventory, where the Alpine Club's one-night guidance actually applies9.
- Not at the Muttenchopf or around Muttsee and Limmern, where this same commune has posted judicial prohibitions with fines to CHF 2'0005.
General rules for wild camping
This list is the whole reason a place with no rule keeps having no rule. Take it to the spots where you actually sleep out, and take it especially seriously here, where the flat ground is a working alp and the water is a breeding site.
- 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 assessment rests on the absence of a prohibition, which is a weaker thing than a prohibition and can change the moment a commune posts a sign. Glarus Süd is in the middle of unifying twenty-five sets of building rules, and a draft Baureglement was in public consultation when this was written; if it is adopted, the analysis above needs redoing. Distances are measured against published polygons and register points, not against markers in the terrain. 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.
Frequently asked questions
Is wild camping allowed at the Oberblegisee?
What is the amphibian inventory, and does it ban tents?
Which building rules actually apply, given the commune merger?
Where does the flattest ground turn out to be?
Does the Alpine Club's one-night tolerance apply here?
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.
Sources
- Official federal geodata, queried 12 August 2026 at the Oberblegisee, WGS84 46.980188 N / 9.013187 E, LV95 2'719'791 / 1'204'437, surface 1'420.0 m. The federal inventory of amphibian spawning sites of national importance returns object GL37 "Oberblegisee" at the point. The game-reserve, wildlife-rest-zone, BLN, raised-bog, fen, mire-landscape, floodplain, dry-meadow and national-parks layers all return an empty result set. The misses were verified with a positive control at LV95 2'626'000 / 1'154'500, which returns federal game reserve no. 3 Kiental, and with an invalid-layer control, which returns HTTP 400 rather than an empty set, so an empty answer here means absence rather than a bad query. map.geo.admin.ch. ↩
- Verordnung über den Schutz der Amphibienlaichgebiete von nationaler Bedeutung (AlgV), SR 451.34, together with the inventory object GL37 Oberblegisee. The ordinance is addressed to the cantons, which must take the protection and maintenance measures the objects require; it is not a prohibition aimed at individual visitors and is not presented as one here. Measured against the returned perimeter, the lake coordinate lies inside the object, 142 m from its boundary, while the flattest dry ground described in this article lies 61 m outside it. fedlex.admin.ch. ↩
- Cadastre of public-law restrictions on landownership, canton of Glarus, extract fetched with geometry on 12 August 2026 for the parcel under the lake: parcel 322, commune of Glarus Süd, 3'251'368 m². The extract returns no concerned theme at this location, so no communal or cantonal land-use overlay applies to the point and there is no local instrument to read against the night. map.geo.gl.ch. ↩
- Gemeinde Glarus Süd, Bauordnung Luchsingen, adopted by the communal assembly on 28 May 2004, 39 pages, read in full on 12 August 2026. Zero occurrences of Zelt, Campieren, Camping, Biwak, Übernachten or Nächtigen, against control terms returning 131 hits for "Art.", 122 for "Zone" and 87 for "Bauten", so the absence is a finding and not a failed scan. Art. 34 para. 1: "Wohnwagen, Wohnmobile und Schiffe etc., die pro Jahr insgesamt mehr als zwei Monate auf der gleichen Liegenschaft stehen, gelten als Gebäude"; para. 2 requires the council's permission for regular temporary parking of under two months. Art. 41 refers penalties to the cantonal building act. Glarus Süd still applies the pre-merger ordinances of its twenty-five founding communes; the unified Baureglement was a December 2024 draft in its second public consultation at the time of writing and is therefore not in force. glarus-sued.ch. ↩
- Gemeinde Glarus Süd, published acts of the communal chancellery, reviewed 12 August 2026. The collection comprises twelve instruments, among them the Gemeindeordnung, the Organisationsverordnung, the Personalreglement and the Vollzugsreglement Gastgewerbegesetz. There is no Polizeireglement and no Campingreglement. The commune's instrument against wild camping is instead a judicial prohibition under art. 258 of the Swiss Civil Procedure Code (SR 272), posted on communal land and backed by a fine of up to CHF 2'000; the locations it has been used for are the Muttenchopf and the Muttsee-Limmern area, not the Oberblegisee. glarus-sued.ch. ↩
- Cantonal law of Glarus, systematic collection. The Einführungsgesetz zum Schweizerischen Zivilgesetzbuch (GS III B/1/1), the Kantonale Ordnungsbussenverordnung (GS III F/1/1) and the Gesetz über den Natur- und Heimatschutz (GS IV G/1/1) return no whole-word occurrence of Campier, Zelt, Biwak or Übernacht. The fixed-penalty ordinance is the decisive one: in a canton that sanctions minor offences from a published catalogue, an offence absent from that catalogue carries no cantonal fixed penalty. gesetze.gl.ch. ↩
- Terrain analysis, 12 August 2026, from the federal terrain model on a 20 m grid over a 640 m box centred on the lake, 1'089 samples, all returned. The lake outline was taken from the federal topographic water layer as a polygon of 158 vertices and used as the mask; 391 samples fall inside it. Masking by elevation alone is insufficient: 340 samples read exactly 1'420.0 m and a further 24 read 1'419.9 m, one decimetre lower and still water. Against the polygon mask, the flattest genuinely dry ground is 0.9 degrees at 1'425.1 m, LV95 2'719'972 / 1'204'697, WGS84 46.982493 N / 9.015627 E, 316 m from the lake coordinate and 88 m from the shore, with 52 of 500 dry candidates under 7 degrees. The mask was sanity-checked in both directions: the lake coordinate reads as water, a point 1.5 km away does not. geo.admin.ch. ↩
- Federal register of buildings and dwellings, queried 12 August 2026 within 600 m of the lake. Four registered buildings at Oberblegi, locality Luchsingen: Oberblegi 2 at 361 m from the lake, Oberblegi 3 at 439 m, Oberblegi 3a at 453 m and Oberblegi 3b at 421 m, one in the dwelling class and three in the agricultural class. Measured from the flattest dry ground identified above, the nearest of them is 108 m away and two more are within 137 m. map.geo.admin.ch. ↩
- Swiss Alpine Club, information on bivouacking and wild camping. The SAC position is that a single, considerate, one-night bivouac above the treeline and outside protected areas is generally tolerated in Switzerland. The qualifier that decides the Oberblegisee is "above the treeline": at 1'420 m the lake lies below it, so the general tolerance does not extend here and the landowner's word governs instead. Guidance, not law. sac-cas.ch. ↩