As of: 30 July 2026

Wild camping at the Selvasee: the commune banned camping, then exempted the bivouac by name

Most Swiss camping bans leave you guessing whether a sleeping bag counts. Vals is the rare commune that answered the question in the text itself, in the same article, one sentence later.

Leon Helg
Leon Helg · Legal situation checked in July 2026 · Published 30 July 2026

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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.

What "wild camping" means here: one night. A small tent or a bivvy bag, up towards evening, gone in the morning. Not a base camp, not a camper van. Most Swiss bans are written against camping; whether a single night also falls under them depends on the exact wording, so this article checks that wording. The full difference: wild camping vs bivouacking.

One communal article decides everything here

Wild camping at the Selvasee is settled by a single page of communal law from 1974. That is unusual. Most of the lakes we research need three or four layers untangled, federal reserve, cantonal ordinance, communal reglement, sometimes a landowner's court order. Here the federal and cantonal levels are silent and one article does all the work.

The instrument is the Polizeiverordnung der Gemeinde Vals, adopted by ballot on 20 May 1973 and in force since 1 May 1974, published in a version dated 1 August 2010. Its Art. 7 is headed simply "Camping".

"Ausserhalb dieser Plätze ist auf Gebiet der Gemeinde Vals auf öffentlichem und privatem Boden ohne Bewilligung des Gemeinderates jedes Kampieren verboten. Dieses Verbot bezieht sich nicht auf das Biwak im Rahmen von einzelnen Bergtouren."Polizeiverordnung der Gemeinde Vals, Art. 7 para. 2: outside the designated places, all camping on the territory of the commune of Vals is forbidden on public and private ground without a permission from the Gemeinderat. This prohibition does not extend to the bivouac in the course of individual mountain tours.

Read the first sentence carefully, because two words in it are doing more than people expect. "Privatem Boden" means the ban reaches private land as well as public. That closes the door that opens at several other Swiss spots: at the Fälensee or the Seealpsee the legal route is the landowner's consent, because the rule there is built around the owner's yes. Here the owner's yes is not enough, because the commune has prohibited camping on his ground too. The only key is a Bewilligung des Gemeinderates.

And "ausserhalb dieser Plätze" refers back to Art. 7 para. 1, which lets the Gemeinderat designate places for camping with tents and caravans, provided they are reachable by motor vehicle and have proper sanitary installations and drinking water. A lake at 2'297 metres with no road, no building within 600 metres and no tap is definitionally not one of those places and never could be.

The fine sits in a different article, which is worth saying because the two get confused. Art. 7 sets no penalty at all. Art. 18, in the ordinance's chapter on Strafbestimmungen, does: breaches of the police ordinance are punished with fines from CHF 50 to CHF 500, and up to CHF 1'000 on repetition. That is a real chain with a named norm behind it, unlike several places where a "ban" turns out to rest on a sentence from a tourism page with nothing at all underneath.1

But nobody up there can write you a ticket, and that is worth being precise about. Switzerland's on-the-spot fine system runs on published offence catalogues, and camping is not in any catalogue that reaches this lake. Graubünden has no general fixed-penalty act at all: only three such ordinances exist in the whole canton, for hunting, for fishing and for the Swiss National Park, and the cantonal police list of general public-order offences runs to exactly four lines, none of them camping. Vals has never set up a communal catalogue of its own either. So a fine under Art. 18 is not something a passing officer can issue; it takes a formal decision by the Gemeinderat sitting as the communal police court, with a right of appeal. And the bivouac was written out of the prohibition before any of that machinery starts.8

The ordinance is still in force. The commune publishes it as current, it carries a maintained repeal annotation on a different article, and the 2012 communal constitution repeals only decisions that conflict with it. Nothing in the collection replaces it.4

Nothing above the commune adds to it, and that is a checked statement rather than an assumption. The entire Graubünden statute book was pulled and searched: all 419 acts in force, in German and again in Italian because the canton legislates trilingually, plus the fifty that exist only as PDFs. Four acts mention camping at all. One governs camping while hunting and says so in its first four words. One is the campsite operator's registration duty. One is a building-permit exemption list. And one is the National Park ordinance, which is the interesting one.8

Graubünden knows exactly how to ban a bivouac, and did it once. The National Park ordinance forbids, in so many words, "zu biwakieren", and the canton's fixed-penalty list prices it at CHF 200. That is the vocabulary, deployed deliberately, in one place ninety kilometres east of here. Nowhere else in Bündner law is a bivouac prohibited. When a canton has the words and uses them precisely once, the silence everywhere else is a drafting choice rather than an oversight, and it makes the Vals carve-out read as exactly what it appears to be.8

How a night here is actually possible

This is the section the question was really about, and Vals gives it an unusually clean answer.

Without a tent, you need nothing from anyone. The final sentence of Art. 7 is not interpretation, it is text: the prohibition does not extend to the bivouac in the course of individual mountain tours. There is no altitude limit in it and no geographic limit; it is keyed to the activity. A bivvy bag on a genuine tour, up towards evening and gone in the morning, is outside the prohibition entirely. It does not need a permission, it cannot trigger Art. 18, and the landowner question never arises.

With a tent, you need the Gemeinderat. Art. 7 para. 1 defines the banned conduct as "Kampieren mit Zelten und Wohnwagen" and then contrasts it with "das Biwak". On the ordinance's own internal contrast, a pitched tent falls on the camping side and needs the communal permission.

Who to ask, in this order. The permission is the commune's to give: Gemeinde Vals, Gemeindehaus, Furra 121, 7132 Vals, 081 920 77 02, gemeinde@vals.ch. Then the people whose pasture and cattle you are actually walking into, the alp crew at Alp Selva, 081 935 13 36, on the alp roughly from the end of June to early September. They are not the legal gatekeeper here, since the commune holds that role, but they are the ones up there, and telling them beats surprising them.

The honest middle, which the text does not resolve. A lightweight tent on a real multi-day tour sits between the two sentences. It is a tour, which points at the exception, and it is a tent, which points at the ban. I have found no Vals practice or decision that settles it, so I am not going to pretend the wording does. If that is your plan, the phone call costs nothing and turns a grey zone into a yes or a no.

What I could not find, said plainly: any fee. No source anywhere names a figure for pitching at the Selvasee or on a Valsertal alp. No honesty box, no "ask the Senn for twenty francs", nothing. At other spots we publish the word-of-mouth rate because one genuinely exists; here inventing one would be worse than useless.

What does exist is one first-hand account. A party in August 2017 wrote that you can spend the night at various places at the Selvasee and that they chose a small patch right next to the grill place belonging to the local fishing club. They asked nobody and nobody came by. Treat that as what it is, a single report from one night nine years ago, but it lines up with something official: the lake carries a private fishing right, and a fishing association is exactly the kind of body that builds a grill place.36

One thing that is not optional: no fire. Art. 9 of the same ordinance bans open fire in forest and on dry meadows and pastures, and it extends the ban expressly to cooking. On top of that the commune published an absolute fire ban outside settlement areas on 17 July 2026 because of drought. A grill place existing at the lake does not suspend either of them. Carry a gas stove and check the current fire warning before you go.14

What the maps say, and a pin you should not trust

The published coordinate is on the water. The Selvasee's pin, 46.584424 / 9.163490, falls inside the lake polygon: I checked it point in polygon against the federal hydrography dataset and it sits 68.2 metres from the nearest shoreline on a lake that measures 197 by 197 metres. That is not an error in the data, it is what a gazetteer label point is, a marker placed at the centre of the feature it names. But it means anyone who navigates to the pin walks into the lake, and any verdict written "at the pin" would be a verdict about open water.2

So here is the shore answer. The usable ground is the north to north-east arc, a bench that runs more than 300 metres and sits only one to ten metres above the lake surface. Two points I checked and confirmed are on dry land: 46.584936 / 9.164550 on the north-east bench at 2'299.4 metres, about 14 metres back from the water, and 46.585503 / 9.162741 on the north-north-west bench at 2'298.7 metres, about 25 metres back and right beside the path. South and south-east the ground rises 11 to 55 metres and turns rocky.

The surface is grass, not scree and not bog. The federal land-cover layer returns no rock, loose-rock or wetland polygon anywhere around the lake, and the aerial shows continuous green pasture to the north and north-east against slabs and scree to the west. One corner to avoid: the outflow, the Selvabach, leaves at the north-west and drops into a gully starting about 113 metres north-north-west, so that corner is the drainage notch and the wettest ground there is.2

Every protection layer came back empty, and I made the emptiness mean something. No federal hunting-ban district, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN object, no mire landscape, raised bog, fen, floodplain or amphibian site, no dry-grassland object, no forest reserve, no park of national importance. Each of those queries ran alongside a deliberately invalid layer id, which returns HTTP 400. That control matters more than it sounds: three layer ids I started with were stale and were also returning HTTP 400, which reads exactly like an empty result if you are not watching for it. Only after correcting them do the empties count as absence.2

One official fact about the lake that surprised me. The Selvasee is one of roughly fifteen waters in the whole of Graubünden where you may not fish on the ordinary cantonal patent, because the fishing right is privately held. The cantonal fishing ordinance lists it by name and number: Selvasee, Gemeinde Vals, water 1017. The neighbouring Guraletschsee and the Zervreilasee are ordinary patent waters. The ordinance does not name the holder and I could not establish who it is. It changes nothing about camping, but it tells you the lake has an interested private party, and it is the likeliest explanation for the grill place.3

Two near-misses that get quoted as camping bans and are not. The commune's Strassenpolizeigesetz forbids leaving cars and trailers, caravans included, overnight on public ground and in publicly accessible car parks. Its object is vehicles, it says nothing about people or tents, and the Selvasee has no vehicle access at all; the implementing rules narrow it further to named village-centre stretches. Separately, the Baugesetz makes laying out a campsite and permanently siting a caravan subject to a building permit. That is infrastructure, not a hiker's night. Neither reaches this lake, and the vehicle rules at the Zervreila car park five kilometres away are a different question from the one this article answers.5

What is coming, for completeness. A new Baugesetz was accepted by ballot on 14 June 2026 and is in its appeal period, so not yet in force; it contains no camping provision at all. And there is a draft Wildruhezonenreglement for Vals whose zone 3 is called Zervreila, with a closed season from 20 December to 15 April. It is an unsigned draft, it is an access rule rather than a camping rule, and it is a winter measure. None of that touches a summer night at the Selvasee, but it is worth knowing that a winter layer may arrive here.4

  • At the lake, without a tent. This is the one the ordinance hands you outright. North or north-east shore, back from the outflow corner, on a genuine tour, one night.
  • At the lake with a tent, after a phone call. Gemeinde Vals, 081 920 77 02. Ask for a Bewilligung under Art. 7 of the Polizeiverordnung and say where and for how long.
  • The valley station car park at Vals, which is the only place in the commune where campers and caravans may stay overnight, summer only, with power, water and sanitary facilities.
  • Vals village, a short bus ride from the Peiltal trailhead, if the weather turns. The walk in is about five hours either as a round trip from Vals or as the three-lake crossing from Zervreila, and the Wanderbus from Peiltal back to Vals needs registration on 081 935 16 49.7

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are allowed to sleep outside, and at this lake, without a tent, you are. It is not legal text, it is decency and common sense, and it is the reason exceptions like the one Vals wrote still exist.

  • 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 July 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.

Communal ordinances change, and the Vals police ordinance dates from 1974 in a version published in 2010, while a revised Baugesetz is in its appeal period and a wildlife rest zone regulation exists in draft. Before every tour, check the current sources yourself, check the fire warning, and follow instructions 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.

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Frequently asked questions

Is wild camping allowed at the Selvasee?
It depends on what you sleep under. Art. 7 of the Polizeiverordnung der Gemeinde Vals forbids all camping outside designated places across the whole commune, on public and private ground alike, without a permission from the Gemeinderat, with a fine of CHF 50 to 500 under Art. 18. But the same article ends with an express exception: the prohibition does not extend to a bivouac in the course of individual mountain tours. So a tentless one-night bivouac on a genuine tour is outside the ban and needs no permission, while a pitched tent needs one from the commune.
Does the landowner's permission help at the Selvasee?
No, and this is where Vals differs from the Alpstein. The prohibition in Art. 7 para. 2 applies expressly on private ground as well as public, so a landowner cannot authorise what the commune has forbidden. The only key for a tent is a Bewilligung des Gemeinderates, from Gemeinde Vals on 081 920 77 02. Telling the alp crew at Alp Selva, 081 935 13 36, is still worth doing, because it is their pasture and their cattle, but it is courtesy rather than the legal route.
Is there a fee for camping at the Selvasee?
None that anyone publishes. I looked for the usual word-of-mouth arrangement, an honesty box or a rate people mention to the Senn, and found nothing at this lake or on the Valsertal alps generally. So there is no figure to give you. What does exist is a grill place at the lake belonging to the local fishing club, and one 2017 account of a party who pitched beside it without asking anyone.
Is the Selvasee inside any protected area?
No. Federal hunting-ban districts, wildlife rest zones, the BLN inventory, mire landscapes, raised bogs, fens, floodplains, amphibian sites, dry grasslands, forest reserves and parks of national importance all return empty at the lake, and each query was run alongside a deliberately invalid layer that returns an HTTP error, so the empty results mean genuine absence. A draft communal wildlife rest zone regulation names a Zervreila zone with a 20 December to 15 April closed season, but it is unsigned, it is an access rule rather than a camping rule, and it is winter only.
Which Selvasee is this, and where exactly is it?
The only one in Switzerland, at 2'297 m in the commune of Vals, canton Graubünden, at the head of the Peiltal under the Ampervreilhorn. The national gazetteer holds exactly one lake of this name. Note that the map pin sits on the water, 68 metres from shore on a lake 197 metres across, because it is the label point at the lake's centre. The ground you want is the north to north-east bench, about 14 to 25 metres back from the waterline, with the marked path passing roughly 100 metres north-north-west.
Leon Helg

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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Sources

  1. Polizeiverordnung der Gemeinde Vals, adopted by Urnenabstimmung 20 May 1973, in force since 1 May 1974, version dated 1 August 2010: Art. 7 (camping, the designation of places requiring motor-vehicle access and sanitary installations, the municipality-wide ban on public and private ground, and the express exception for the bivouac in the course of individual mountain tours), Art. 9 (fire police, open fire banned in forest and on dry meadows and pastures, extending to cooking), Art. 18 (fines from CHF 50 to CHF 500, up to CHF 1'000 on repetition). gemeinde-vals.ch. ↩
  2. Official federal geodata, queried 30 July 2026. Identify at LV95 2'732'192 / 1'160'692 returns no object on the hunting-ban district, wildlife rest zone, BLN, mire landscape, raised bog, fen, floodplain, amphibian, dry grassland, forest reserve or national-park layers. Elevation 2'296.9 m via the federal height service. Point-in-polygon against swissTLM3D water body 1256523 "Selvasee" puts the published coordinate inside the lake, 68.2 m from the nearest shoreline, on a polygon 197 by 197 m; the north-east point 46.584936 / 9.164550 (2'299.4 m) and the north-north-west point 46.585503 / 9.162741 (2'298.7 m) are both on land. Every query ran with an invalid-layer control returning HTTP 400, so an empty result is a genuine absence rather than a failed request; three layer ids in the first pass were stale and returned that same HTTP 400, which is exactly why the control is run. map.geo.admin.ch. ↩
  3. Fischereibetriebsvorschriften des Kantons Graubünden 2026, Art. 7 "Gewässer mit privaten Fischereirechten", lit. b, listing "Selvasee, Gemeinde Vals (1017)" at 2'297 m as private, against the neighbouring Guraletschsee (1016) and Zervreilasee (1015) which are ordinary patent waters. The holder of the right is not named in the ordinance. gr.ch, Amt für Jagd und Fischerei. ↩
  4. Collection of the commune of Vals, Online-Schalter, enumerated in full on 30 July 2026: 48 entries of which 27 are normative enactments, all substantive documents downloaded and searched for camping vocabulary, including one scanned document read by OCR rather than skipped. There is no separate Camping-Reglement and no ordinance on the use of public ground. Also covered: the new Baugesetz accepted by ballot on 14 June 2026 and in its appeal period since 10 July 2026, therefore not in force and containing no camping provision; the unsigned draft Wildruhezonenreglement whose zone 3 Zervreila carries a closed season of 20 December to 15 April; and the communal notice of 17 July 2026 announcing an absolute fire ban outside settlement areas. gemeinde-vals.ch. ↩
  5. Two Vals instruments that are frequently mistaken for camping bans and do not reach this lake. Strassenpolizeigesetz der Gemeinde Vals, Art. 2: leaving cars and trailers, caravans included, overnight on public ground or in publicly accessible car parks is prohibited; its object is vehicles rather than persons or tents, and the implementing provisions of 3 July 1996 narrow the standing parking ban to named village-centre stretches. Baugesetz der Gemeinde Vals, Art. 91 lit. k and l: building-permit duty for laying out and operating campsites and for caravans permanently sited outside campsites. gemeinde-vals.ch. ↩
  6. Ground truth at the lake. Weid- und Flurordnung der Gemeinde Vals, approved by ballot 27 November 2011, Art. 1 and 2: the Allmenden on communal territory are the commune's property and are administered by the Gemeinderat, which may lease them on six-year contracts, with a Weidchef granting case-by-case permissions. Alp Selva is worked by an Alpgenossenschaft with roughly 70 cattle, one of fourteen cattle alps on Vals territory, reachable on 081 935 13 36 during the season from about the end of June to early September. The single first-hand camping account is from August 2017 and reports pitching beside the fishing club's grill place without asking anyone. Contacts: Gemeinde Vals, Furra 121, 7132 Vals, 081 920 77 02, gemeinde@vals.ch; Visit Vals AG, 081 920 70 70. gemeinde-vals.ch. ↩
  7. Access and terrain. The lake lies about 3.9 km south-west of Vals Platz at the head of the Peiltal, with a marked white-red-white Bergwanderweg passing roughly 107 m north-north-west of the pin. Standard approaches are the Selvasee round trip from Vals, about 11.8 km with 1'087 m of ascent, and the three-lake walk from Zervreila, about 12.7 km with 673 m of ascent and 856 m of descent, descending afterwards past Heinisch-Stafel and Alp Selva to Peiltal at 1'667 m, where the Wanderbus back to Vals requires registration on 081 935 16 49. Note that at least one widely copied hiking page gives the lake as 2'335 m; swisstopo, the cantonal fishing ordinance and the commune all give 2'297 m. vals.ch. ↩
  8. Canton Graubünden has no camping or bivouac prohibition of general application, established by enumeration: the complete cantonal collection was pulled (419 acts in force) and searched in German and again in Italian, since the canton legislates trilingually and the Italian and Romansh indexes return the identical 419 numbers, plus the fifty acts that exist only as PDFs. Controls: an invalid language returns HTTP 400 and an unknown number returns 404, and the 419 acts populate all 94 systematic categories with no empty branch. Only four acts mention camping: the hunting operations ordinance (BR 740.025) art. 13, whose scope is set by its own opening words "Für die Ausübung der Jagd"; the National Park ordinance (BR 498.200) art. 5 lit. a, which forbids "zu biwakieren" and is the only bivouac prohibition in the entire Bündner Rechtsbuch, roughly 90 km east of here, priced at CHF 200 in the National Park fixed-penalty list; the planning ordinance (BR 801.110) art. 40, which is a permit-exemption list; and the innkeeping implementing provisions, which bind the campsite operator. There is no camping or bivouac offence in any Graubünden fixed-penalty catalogue: only three such ordinances exist in the canton, for hunting, fishing and the National Park, and the general public-order list in the police ordinance runs to four lines covering fireworks, indecent behaviour, soiling property and begging. Vals has set up no communal catalogue, so a fine under Art. 18 requires a formal decision by the Gemeinderat sitting as the communal police court. The cantonal gazette was searched: 28 judicial-prohibition notices mentioning Vals were read in full, of which two are genuine Vals prohibitions and both concern parcels in the village, while Zervreila, Leis, Frunt, Peil, Selva and Selvasee return none; camping-flavoured judicial prohibitions do exist elsewhere in the canton, which shows the search would have surfaced one here. Coverage caveat: the pre-2016 archive is OCR of whole scanned issues, so an older prohibition cannot be excluded with the same confidence. The reservoir operator Kraftwerke Zervreila publishes no prohibition on the surrounding ground, only a warning about sudden water rises, and has obtained no judicial prohibition, unlike two neighbouring Surselva hydro operators who did and whose prohibitions stop at vehicles. Finally, the pin lies inside the communal Ruhezone under art. 51 of the Vals building act, which prohibits touristic transport installations and motorised traffic and says nothing about tents, overnighting or arriving on foot, and inside the cantonal landscape inventory object 231 Ampervreilhorn, which under art. 6 para. 1 of the cantonal nature protection act has "ausschliesslich amtsinterne Wirkung" and binds no individual. gr-lex.gr.ch. ↩

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My 141 favourite spots in the Swiss Alps. With directions and a wildcamping analysis for every spot.

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