Wild camping at the Sächserseeli: it depends which shore, and the line is 25 metres out

Nothing federal, and then the commune

The federal layers are genuinely empty. Queried on 16 August 2026 at the Sächserseeli, 2'735'818 / 1'212'939 in LV95, 47.053554 N / 9.226319 E, at 2'096.2 metres: no federal game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN landscape, no mire landscape, no fen, no raised bog, no amphibian site, no dry meadow, no park of national importance, no forest reserve, and no building zone. An invalid layer name returns HTTP 400 rather than an empty list, so the emptiness is an answer. Canton St. Gallen, commune Flums, from current-year records.¹

One detail that shapes everything below: the map pin is on the water. Slope reads 0.0 degrees because it sits inside the lake polygon. So the question was never "is the pin legal", it was "which piece of shore is".¹

The commune is where the rule lives. Flums has a Schutzverordnung, enacted by the Gemeinderat on the basis of art. 18 of the federal nature-protection act, art. 98 ff. of the cantonal Baugesetz and art. 12 ff. of the cantonal Naturschutzverordnung, approved by the cantonal Baudepartement on 11 February 2008 and revised in 2010, 2011 and 2017. It defines ten kinds of protected object, from Ortsbildschutzgebiet to Wildruhezone.²

Art. 8, for the Naturschutzgebiete, is the one that matters. It requires those areas to be kept in their character as near-natural surfaces, prohibits all activities that endanger them, and then lists them. Among the bullets, in the same breath as building, dumping and collecting plants:

"die Nutzung zu Erholungs- und Freizeitzwecken, wie Lagern, Zelten, Campieren und das Anfachen von Feuer, ausser an den bezeichneten Stellen", the use for recreation and leisure such as camping, tenting, camping out and lighting fires, except at the designated places.²

There are no designated places at this lake. And the sanction is not a fixed-penalty ticket: art. 21 says whoever breaches the ordinance is punished with detention or a fine, and that both intentional and negligent breaches are punishable.²

The lake itself, though, is not in a Naturschutzgebiet. The official register of restrictions, pulled with geometry and tested point in polygon against 578 records, puts the pin inside exactly one protection object: a Lebensraum-Schongebiet. Its art. 15 requires the area to be preserved as habitat and prohibits activities that impair the Kerngebiete, listing road building, extraction of stone, gravel, sand, clay and peat, fills and landfills. There is no camping clause in art. 15, and the nearest Kerngebiet is 301 metres away. A deliberately invented parcel identifier returns HTTP 204 from the same service, so the extract is an answer and not a default.³

So the ordinance bans camping, and the lake is not in the zone where the ban applies. Which sounds like a clean yes, until you look at where you would actually sleep.

The line is 25 metres from the water, and it decides everything

The nearest Naturschutzgebiet is 25 metres from the pin. It is one of several "Naturschutzgebiet feucht B (beweidet)" objects scattered around this basin, with more at 127 m, 154 m, 605 m and beyond. The lake sits in a Schongebiet with reserve fingers reaching almost to the waterline.³

To find out what that means in practice, a masked slope scan ran over the 350 metres around the lake, stepping every 25 metres, discarding anything inside a water polygon, and classifying every remaining point against the ordinance's own polygons. It found 74 spots at or under 7 degrees. Here is the part that matters:¹³

The three nearest flat spots are inside the nature reserve. 6.2 degrees at 50 metres, 5.7 degrees at 56 metres, 5.0 degrees at 75 metres: all three return both Lebensraum-Schongebiet and Naturschutzgebiet feucht B. On those, art. 8 applies and a tent is prohibited.¹

Lawful ground starts at about 79 metres. From there the classification comes back Schongebiet only: 2.5 degrees at 2'105.1 m at 79 metres, 3.3 degrees at 103 metres, 2.4 degrees at 127 metres, and the flattest of the lot, 0.7 degrees at 2'092.5 m, 160 metres out. One outlier at 158 metres drops back into the reserve, so the edge is not a tidy circle.¹

This is the sentence to remember: the closer you camp to the water, the more likely you are breaking the rule. That is the opposite of the instinct everyone has at a mountain tarn, which is exactly why this article exists.

How to know which side you are on

The boundary has no fence, no sign and no cairn. It is a line in a communal plan. So check it, and it takes about a minute:

Open the swisstopo map and turn on the protection-zone layer. On map.geo.admin.ch the cantonal and communal protection perimeters can be displayed over the national map, and the reserve edges around this lake are drawn there. Zoom to the Sächserseeli and you can see which shore is reserve and which is Schongebiet.³

Then compare it with your phone. Turn on your GPS position in the same map, or read your coordinates from any hiking app and find them on the layer. If you are standing on a flat patch within about seventy metres of the water, assume you are in the reserve until the map tells you otherwise. If you want the decision made in advance, walk to 2'624'670 style coordinates is not this spot: for this lake the checked lawful points are 79 m out at 2'105.1 m and, flattest, 160 m out at 2'092.5 m.¹

Do it on site, not from memory. Perimeters get revised, this article is a snapshot of August 2026, and a phone with the layer open beats a remembered paragraph every time.

Two more things that apply on the lawful side. There is a Wildruhezone in this ordinance 301 metres away, and under art. 15a the wildlife rest zones may not be entered or driven into from 16 December to the end of the ski season. It protects black grouse and capercaillie. In summer it does not reach you here; in winter it is the rule that will.²

And there is no building within 900 metres, so there is nobody to ask and nothing to fall back on. Carry your water, carry your rubbish out, one night, no fire anywhere in this basin, and pitch late.¹

General rules for wild camping

You are on the edge of a protected wetland at just over 2'000 m, on ground where the rule changes within eighty metres. That asks for more care than usual:

• 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.

The distances here are point samples from the official geometry, not a survey. Twenty-five metres is a warning that the boundary is close, not a measured line you can pace out. On the ground, check the protection layer against your GPS.

The Flums Vorschriften are published as a scanned document that machine text extraction reads as 624 characters. The findings above come from an OCR pass whose control terms count normally, 44 occurrences of Art and 82 of Schutz. That is a genuine read, but it is OCR of a scan, so if a word matters to your decision, open the ordinance yourself at the link below.

Frequently asked questions

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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