Wild camping at the Rochers de Naye: nothing bans it, and the landowner is a commune

One text covers this mountain, and it is a consent rule

Canton Vaud has an online reputation for banning wild camping outright. It is not built on a citation, because there is no cantonal Vaud prohibition to cite. The Loi sur la protection du patrimoine naturel et paysager of 30 August 2022, in force since 1 January 2023, is the canton's nature act and it contains no occurrence of camping, tent, bivouac or caravan across its 73 articles.⁴ What exists here is communal.

And Veytaux does not write its own police regulation. It is one of the nine communes of the Association de communes Sécurité Riviera, and art. 94 of the association's Règlement général de police intercommunal repeals the member communes' own police provisions in the delegated domains, in those words. So there is exactly one text to read, the RGPi of 15 April 2010 in its state of 10 April 2025, and art. 33 is the whole of the camping question.²

"Celui qui, avec l'assentiment du propriétaire du fonds ou, le cas échéant, du fermier ou du locataire, campe plus de quatre jours hors d'une place spécialement aménagée à cet effet doit obtenir une autorisation de l'ASR. L'autorisation peut notamment être refusée lorsque le campeur ne peut bénéficier, à proximité, d'une installation sanitaire. Il est interdit de camper sur la voie publique et ses abords ainsi que dans les forêts."Art. 33 RGPi: anyone who, with the consent of the landowner or, as the case may be, the farmer or the tenant, camps for more than four days outside a site specially arranged for it must obtain a permit from the ASR. The permit may be refused in particular where the camper has no sanitary installation nearby. It is forbidden to camp on the public road and its surroundings, and in forests.

Read the three sentences separately. The first is a permit duty that starts after four days, and it assumes the landowner has already agreed. The second is about that permit. The third is the only outright prohibition in the article, and it names two places: the public road with its surroundings, and forest. One considerate night on alp pasture, with the owner's agreement, is caught by none of them. That is why the verdict here is "it depends" rather than "illegal": something is genuinely being asked of you, and it is not a fine, it is a yes.

What happens if you get it wrong is worth knowing precisely, because it is smaller than the internet suggests. Art. 93 of the same regulation is the fixed-penalty schedule under the cantonal Loi sur les amendes d'ordre communales, and reading the whole list, public domain, cemeteries, ports, there is no camping entry at all. Nothing about a tent can be ticketed on the spot. A breach would run through the ordinary contravention route, and art. 25 of the Vaud Loi sur les contraventions caps what a municipal authority can impose at CHF 500, or CHF 1'000 for a repeat or a continuing offence.²³

One more piece of precision. Art. 33's operative verb is camper, which in ordinary usage means a tent. Whether a tentless bivvy bag is caught by the word at all has never been tested here, and it does not need to be: the article is not a ban, so the honest route is the same either way, which is to ask.

What the maps say, and the line that is not on the tourist map

Queried at the summit and at five more points across the alp on 18 August 2026, the federal inventories come back empty: no game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no high or low mire, no mire landscape, no floodplain, no dry meadow of national importance, no amphibian site, no waterbird reserve, no Ramsar site, no Emerald site, no biosphere reserve, no Pro Natura reserve, no forest reserve. That zero is only worth something with a control, so the same sweep ran an invalid layer id, which returned HTTP 400 rather than a clean-looking empty answer, and two positive control points, which returned the Kiental game reserve and the Swiss National Park as they should.¹

Two layers do answer. The summit is inside BLN 1515, Tour d'Aï - Dent de Corjon, 12'490 hectares across eleven Vaud communes and one Fribourg one. A BLN listing is an instruction to authorities under the federal nature protection act; it does not fine a camper, and its object sheet contains no occurrence of camping, tent or bivouac.⁷ The summit is also inside the Parc naturel régional Gruyère Pays-d'Enhaut. A regional nature park is a label with a charter. The federal parks ordinance keeps its access prohibitions for the core zone of a national park at art. 17, and the regional-park articles impose duties on the park and on planning rather than on visitors.⁶

The park says so itself, which is the cleanest confirmation available. Its own Camping sauvage et bivouac sheet marks the forbidden zones in brown, federal game reserves, and green hatching, nature reserves, lists the two communes inside the park that do restrict camping, Château-d'Œx and Corbeyrier, and asks everyone else to "consulter le propriétaire ou exploitant du terrain". On the park's own map the Rochers de Naye sit inside the perimeter and inside none of the forbidden zones. Veytaux is not on the list of restricting communes.⁶

Then there is the line no tourist map draws. The cadastre of public-law restrictions puts the summit, the station and the shoulder below them inside groundwater protection zone S2 of the Grandchamps and Sonchaux catchment, and three small S1 zones, the captation zones themselves, sit on the alp within a few hundred metres. That is not a camping ban. The cantonal model regulation for S zones works by positive lists of constructions, installations and farming uses, and a campsite is only permitted from S3 outwards, with sealed drains; a single tent is neither a construction nor a campsite.⁵

It is still the most useful fact in this report, because it tells you what the ground under you is doing. This is karst, and it is feeding the Riviera's drinking water. It is also why the flat-ground question below has a twist in it.

How to do it

Ask the commune of Veytaux. The Rochers-de-Naye alpages are communal property; Veytaux had the cattle path up to them built in 1916 and the alp is still walked up every summer by a tenant's herd. Art. 33 wants "l'assentiment du propriétaire du fonds ou, le cas échéant, du fermier ou du locataire", so the owner is the commune and the tenant is whoever is working the alp that season.⁸

Do not pitch at the pin. The summit is a working viewpoint: a cog railway terminus at 1'973 m, a restaurant, a shop, an alpine garden, a marmot enclosure and seven yurts, sitting on a 900 square metre building right carved out of the communal parcel. The crest itself reads 44 degrees on the height model, and the flat ground within 55 metres of the top, at 2'023 to 2'033 m, is the viewing terrace everybody walks on.¹

And do not pitch on the flattest ground either. This is the trap. The gentlest ground in the whole scan is 3.2 degrees at 1'862 m, about 640 metres east of the summit, and it lies inside an S1 spring zone, where even grazing is excluded. Sleeping on a captation is the one thing that would actually matter up here.⁵

Aim for the shoulder instead. The pitch this report would use is 2'564'768 / 1'142'503, about 1'922 m, 7.1 degrees: pasture southeast of the station, 349 metres from the summit, 190 metres away from the buildings, and 89 metres clear of the nearest S1 boundary. It is above the tree line, and the nearest legally defined forest area is more than two kilometres away, so the forest half of art. 33 does not reach it.¹⁵

No fire. Art. 65 of the same regulation forbids open fire in the open air, and although it does allow grilling where every precaution against fire has been taken, that allowance was not written for dry alp grass at 1'900 m in August. Bring a gas stove.²

Take the toilet rule seriously here. On most mountains "fifty metres from water" is good manners. Above a karst catchment that supplies a town it is the reason you are welcome at all: pack it out, or at the very least go far from any hollow, spring or trough.

If you would rather not ask, there is a paid answer on the same summit. Seven Mongolian yurts and a dormitory sleep at 2'000 m, run alongside the railway, which is the legal, arranged version of the same night. It is not wild camping, and this report does not pretend otherwise, but it is the honest alternative if the consent route does not come off.

General rules for wild camping

You are on communal alp pasture above a drinking-water catchment, with a rule that asked you politely rather than banning you. Behave like it:

• 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.

Art. 33 is quoted from the ratified consolidated RGPi of 15 April 2010 in its state of 10 April 2025. That file is a scan without a text layer and was read by optical character recognition, checked against control terms; the version that surfaces first in a search engine is the superseded 2016 one. Communal and intercommunal regulations are revised, so read the current file at the link below before you rely on it.

The reading offered here, that a consented single night on alp pasture falls outside all three sentences of art. 33, is our reading and not a ruling. Nothing in this report is permission: the article itself makes the landowner's agreement the starting point, and the commune of Veytaux is free to say no.

Coordinates, slopes and zone boundaries are point samples from the national height model and the cadastre of public-law restrictions, not a survey. Protection zones are redrawn from time to time. If you are anywhere near a spring, a trough or a fenced enclosure, assume you are too close and move.

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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.

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