Game reserves and wildlife rest zones: the one check to do before you go

They are two different instruments and people constantly merge them. In a federal game reserve, free camping is prohibited all year, with a fixed penalty of CHF 150.¹ A wildlife rest zone is not a camping rule at all: it is a seasonal entry restriction, where during the protection period you may only use marked routes.² Assuming the second logic applies to the first is how people end up fined for a July bivouac.

Federal game reserves: year round, no exceptions locally

The federal hunting-ban districts are set by federal ordinance, and its Art. 5 para. 1 lit. e says free tenting and camping are prohibited, with official campsites excepted. The cantons may permit exceptions. A commune cannot, and neither can the person who owns the ground.¹

That last part is what makes this layer worth checking first. Everywhere else in Swiss wild camping there is a route: ask the alp tenant, ask the commune, find the exception in the reglement. Inside a game reserve there is no local route at all, and the answer does not change with the season, the weather or how considerate you plan to be.

The number is CHF 150 as a fixed penalty, which is a tariff rather than a ceiling, so it is what you actually pay.³ The framework ceiling above it, in the federal Hunting Act, is CHF 20,000, and that is what appears in our reports for spots like the Tannhorn and the Hagelseewli.

Wildlife rest zones: seasonal, and about where you walk

A wildlife rest zone answers a different question. It is not primarily about sleeping; it is about disturbance, mostly in winter and spring when animals are living on reserves they cannot replace. Inside a binding zone, during the protection period, you may only enter on the marked routes shown on the map.²

Two consequences follow that people miss. First, outside the protection period the restriction is not in force, so a rest zone that closes a slope in February may say nothing at all in August. Second, inside the period it can stop you reaching a spot that is itself perfectly legal, because the restriction bites on the approach rather than on the pitch.

It is also a separate offence with its own tariff in the fixed-penalty schedule, which is the cleanest evidence that the two layers are not the same thing.³

How to actually check, in about two minutes

The official portal for the rest zones is wildruhezonen.ch, which carries a map of the zones and their routes, and it is the version the cantons feed.² The federal geoportal map.geo.admin.ch carries both the rest zones and the game reserves as layers, and the same data is available as a service through geodienste.ch for anyone wanting it in a mapping tool.⁴

Two habits make the check reliable rather than reassuring. Look at the boundary at your actual pitch, not at the summit or the lake name, because these perimeters were drawn for wildlife and they cut across features rather than following them. And check the date: the data is revised at least once a year, ahead of the winter season, so a screenshot from a previous season is not evidence about this one.

One more, borrowed from how we run our own spot reports. When a layer comes back empty, confirm that the query itself worked by running it once against a layer name that does not exist. A failed request and a genuine absence look identical otherwise, and treating a broken query as a clean result is the easiest way to publish a confident mistake.

Why the boundary matters more than the name

The clearest case in our whole corpus is the Lötzisalpsattel in the Alpstein. The Säntis game reserve boundary runs straight through the saddle: stand on the north-east side and you are outside it, walk a short way south-west and you are inside. Same saddle, same view, two different legal situations, and nothing on the ground marks the line.

The same logic decided the pin behind the Schäfler, which sits 192 metres outside the Säntis reserve. That is a comfortable margin on paper and an invisible one in fog, which is the practical argument for checking the coordinate you will actually sleep at rather than the name of the place you are heading to.

It also cuts the other way, and this is the part worth remembering. A spot inside a reserve is closed no matter how good your reasons are. A spot just outside one is not closed by proximity. Neither of those is something you can judge by eye.

Six spots these two layers decided

Each read to the named article and each perimeter checked against a deliberately invalid control layer, so that an empty answer means absence rather than a failed query.

• Milchspüelersee, GLReserve, forbidden

  Deep inside the Freiberg Kärpf, the oldest federal game reserve in Switzerland. CHF 150 fixed penalty and no landowner can wave it through.¹

• Tannhorn, BEReserve, forbidden

  The summit pin sits in a gap a few metres wide between two federal reserves. Forbidden in every direction, with the Hunting Act ceiling at CHF 20,000.

• Hagelseewli, BEReserve, forbidden

  Both lakes of that name lie inside the Schwarzhorn reserve, so the federal ban applies before any communal question is even reached.

• Lötzisalpsattel, AIBoundary runs through it

  The Säntis reserve boundary crosses the saddle. North-east is outside, south-west is inside, and nothing on the ground shows the line.⁵

• Schäfler, AIOutside, by 192 m

  The pin behind the Schäfler is 192 metres outside the Säntis reserve. Comfortable on paper, invisible in fog, which is the whole argument for checking the coordinate.⁵

• Sigriswiler Rothorn, BESeasonal only

  The restriction here runs 1 September to 30 November and nothing applies outside it, a clean example of a seasonal layer rather than a year-round one.⁶