The SAC rules on camping and bivouacking: what they are, and what they are not

The SAC issues recommendations, not permissions, and it says so on the same page. The information sheet on camping and bivouacking gives genuinely good advice about where to sleep with the least harm.¹ It also states plainly that the legal situation in Switzerland is not uniform, and recommends asking the commune, because numerous communes have their own additional rules.² Both halves are in the sheet. Only the first half tends to survive the trip into a blog post.

What the sheet actually is

The Swiss Alpine Club is a mountaineering association with about 170 years of history, a hut network, and an environment department that publishes guidance for its members and for anyone else who wants it. The camping and bivouacking sheet is part of that guidance. It exists because the SAC has an interest in mountain sport staying socially accepted, and sloppy overnight stays are the fastest way to lose that.

What it is not is a legal instrument. The SAC cannot grant you permission to sleep anywhere, cannot override a communal regulation, and has never claimed either. Reading the sheet as a permit is a category error, and it is one the sheet itself tries to head off by pointing you at your commune.²

It is worth reading in full anyway, and not as a legal document. On the question the law does not answer, which is how to sleep out without wrecking the place, it is the single best source in Switzerland.

The definitions, which do real work

The sheet separates two things that everyday speech runs together. Bivouacking means spending the night without a tent: under the open sky, in an igloo, in a snow cave. Camping means a night in a small tent outside an official campsite.¹ The emergency bivouac, the one you did not plan because the weather or the hour made the descent unwise, is treated separately and is generally permitted.

This is not pedantry. Swiss communal prohibitions are very often written about tents specifically, because a tent is what the drafters pictured. Whether a person in a bivvy bag is caught by such a rule depends entirely on its wording, and that split decides real cases: Vals writes the bivouac out of its camping ban by name, so a tent there needs a permit and a bivvy bag does not.³ At the Oeschinensee the opposite happened, and a separate court-backed prohibition was obtained to close exactly that gap.⁴

So when you read any Swiss rule about sleeping outside, the first question is which of the two words it uses, and whether it defines it.

Where the sheet stops being advice and starts restating law

Parts of the sheet are the SAC recommending. Other parts are the SAC telling you about a prohibition that binds you whether or not you have ever heard of the SAC. The sheet does not typographically separate these, which is where most of the confusion comes from, so the table below does.

The hard edges are the protected areas: the Swiss National Park, the federal hunting-ban districts, many nature reserves, and wildlife rest zones during their protection period.¹ Inside a federal hunting-ban district free camping is prohibited by federal ordinance, the fixed penalty is CHF 150, and no commune or landowner can wave it through.⁵ That is not the SAC's opinion, it is federal law, and the sheet is simply pointing at it.

The soft parts, and they are good advice, are the ecological ones: choose ground above the treeline rather than at the upper forest edge, stay back from water, one night, small group, leave nothing. Ignoring those is not an offence in itself. It is just how spots get closed.

Why people search for the SAC by name

Because the real answer is unsatisfying. There is no Swiss wild camping law to look up. The question of whether you may sleep on a given patch of ground is decided by whichever commune owns the rulebook there, and there are roughly 2,000 of those, most with nothing indexed and some publishing through systems that will not serve a plain request.

Against that, a single national body with a clear sheet looks like the answer. It is understandable and it is wrong, and the cost of being wrong is real: several of the spots we have researched are forbidden by communal rules while sitting on exactly the ground the SAC would call ecologically fine.

The honest version is that you need both. Use the SAC sheet to decide how to sleep out. Use the commune, the federal protected-area layers and any posted prohibition to decide whether you may. They are different questions and only one of them has an SAC answer.

The sheet's main points, split by what they actually are

Same document, two very different kinds of statement. The left column is what the sheet says; the right is whether ignoring it is bad practice or an offence.

• One considerate night, small group, above the treelineRecommendation

  Ecological guidance, and good. It grants nothing. Communes can and do prohibit camping at any altitude, and several of our forbidden verdicts sit above 2,000 metres.¹

• Not in the National Park, hunting-ban districts, reserves or rest zonesLaw

  These are real prohibitions the sheet is relaying. Free camping in a federal hunting-ban district is a CHF 150 fixed penalty and no local permission reaches inside.⁵

• An emergency bivouac is generally permittedLaw

  An unplanned night forced by weather, injury or darkness is treated differently from one you set out to have. Do not use it as a label for a planned trip.¹

• Keep about 50 metres from waterRecommendation

  Sound practice for water quality and wildlife, not a distance written into a national statute. Some cantonal reserves do set their own hard rules.¹

• Ask the commune, many have extra rulesLaw, pointed at

  The sheet's own advice, and the most important line in it. This is the layer that decides most Swiss spots and the one nobody checks.²

• Leave no trace, take everything outBoth

  A recommendation as a principle, but littering is finable almost anywhere in Switzerland, including cantons that have no camping fine at all.⁶