Wild camping on the Tanatzhöhi

The commune publishes one act and is governed by another

Wild camping on the Tanatzhöhi turns on a question that sounds like paperwork and decides everything: which building act is actually in force above Splügen. Get that wrong and you will read the commune's own website and come away with the opposite answer to the correct one.

Go to the Gesetze page of the Gemeinde Rheinwald and you find exactly one document called Baugesetz. It is the Baugesetz Rheinwald 2025, and its art. 15 is headed "Campieren".

"Das Campieren ausserhalb von Zonen mit erlaubter Campingnutzung ist unter Vorbehalt von Abs. 2 nicht gestattet."Baugesetz Rheinwald 2025, art. 15 para. 1: camping outside zones with permitted camping use is not allowed, subject to para. 2. Para. 2 lets the commune permit exceptions for offers aimed at single overnight stays, in particular temporary tent camps, car parks or pitches the commune designates, and farms.

Read on its own that is a clean commune-wide ban with no way round it except asking. It is also not the law here yet, and the document says so on its own title page. Under the heading "Von der Regierung genehmigt am:" there is a blank space where a date belongs. The Gemeindeversammlung adopted it on 5 December 2025, the commune put it on public display for appeals on 29 January 2026, and its own art. 99 para. 1 spells out what happens next: the act "tritt nach Annahme durch die Gemeindeversammlung mit der Genehmigung durch die Regierung in Kraft". Art. 49 para. 1 of the cantonal planning act says the same thing from above, that a communal building act needs the government's approval and enters into force with the approval decision. Art. 99 para. 3 then confirms what holds in the meantime: the earlier provisions of the former communes count as repealed only once the new act takes effect.²³

So which act does apply? I did not want to answer that from reasoning alone, so I asked the register whose job it is to know. Graubünden has introduced the ÖREB cadastre, the official register of public-law restrictions on landownership, for Rheinwald. Pulling the extract for the parcel that contains the summit returns, among the legally binding provisions, one entry that settles it: "Baugesetz Splügen", official number 3694.(1). Not the 2025 act. The former commune's act, still doing the work.³

Until the end of 2018 the Tanatzhöhi was in the commune of Splügen, which merged with Hinterrhein and Nufenen into Rheinwald on 1 January 2019. A merger does not automatically fuse three building acts into one; that is what the 2025 revision is for, and until it is approved each former commune keeps its own. The Baugesetz der Gemeinde Splügen was adopted by the Gemeindeversammlung on 14 November 2014 and approved by the cantonal government on 5 May 2015 with RB Nr. 394. Its art. 64 is headed "Campieren" and consists of a single paragraph.

"Das Campieren und das Abstellen von Fahrzeugen zu Aufenthalts- und Übernachtungszwecken sind ausserhalb der Campingzone auf öffentlichem Grund verboten."Baugesetz der Gemeinde Splügen, art. 64 para. 1: camping, and parking vehicles for the purpose of staying or spending the night, are forbidden outside the camping zone on public ground.

Everything hangs on the last three words. "Auf öffentlichem Grund" is a limitation, and a deliberate one. Compare it with the communes that meant the opposite and said so: Vals forbids camping "auf öffentlichem und privatem Boden", Pontresina reaches its whole territory. Splügen wrote a narrower rule. Ground that is not public ground is not caught by the sentence at all, and no other communal instrument fills the gap, because there is no gap-filler to find.

That last claim is checked rather than assumed. I downloaded all 41 acts in the Rheinwald collection and searched the full text of every one of them for camping, tent, bivouac and overnight words. The commune has no Polizeigesetz and no Polizeiverordnung at all, which is the instrument that usually carries a camping ban. Outside the two building acts, the word "Camping" appears in exactly one place in the entire collection: the Tourismusgesetz, where it is a line in the visitor-tax tariff setting the flat rate for a Camping-Stellplatz. A tax rate is not a prohibition.⁶

And nothing comes down from the canton either. I pulled the full consolidated text of the four Graubünden acts that could plausibly carry a camping rule, the Polizeigesetz (BR 613.000), the Kantonales Jagdgesetz (BR 740.000), the Raumplanungsgesetz KRG (BR 801.100) and the Kantonales Waldgesetz (BR 920.100), and searched each of them. Not one occurrence of campieren, Camping, Zelt, Biwak or übernachten in any of the four. Graubünden simply has no camping rule for the public, which is why in this canton the communal page is always the page that decides.⁵

The fine is real, and it comes from the canton. The Baugesetz Splügen has no penalty article of its own. It does not need one: art. 95 para. 1 KRG punishes anyone who breaches the planning act "oder darauf beruhende Erlasse und Verfügungen des Kantons oder der Gemeinden" with a fine between CHF 200 and CHF 40'000, and para. 3 puts the communal building authority in charge of imposing it. So the chain has a named norm, a named article and a named sanction, which is the standard this site holds itself to before calling anything forbidden or restricted.⁵

How a night here is actually possible

The wording gives you a route, and it also gives you a question you have to answer first.

The question: is the ground under the summit public ground? I can tell you exactly what it is without being able to tell you the answer. The summit sits on a single cadastral parcel, number 649, and that parcel is 5'053'356 square metres. Five hundred hectares. That is not a plot, that is an entire alp, which is how high pasture is usually held in Graubünden. The commune's Flur- und Weidegesetz then tells you how such land is handled here: art. 2 and art. 3 say the political commune leases its agricultural land to farmers resident in the commune, and that its Gemeinschaftsweiden und Alpen can be leased to farmers and Alpgenossenschaften. So the realistic picture is commune-owned alp, worked under a lease.³⁷

Why that does not settle it by itself. "Öffentlicher Grund" in Swiss usage normally means ground in public use, roads, squares, public installations, rather than every square metre a public body happens to own. Leased alp pasture is worked as ordinary property, not as a public thoroughfare. There is a serious argument that art. 64 does not reach it, and a commune could take the broader view that anything it owns is public ground. I have found no Splügen or Rheinwald decision that tests the point, so I am not going to invent an answer. What I will say is that this is a question with a phone number attached, and the phone call is short.

The second route, which does not depend on the public-ground question at all. Art. 30 para. 4 of the same Baugesetz Splügen lets the Gemeindevorstand authorise temporary tent camps outside the camping zone. That is written for groups rather than for one person with a bivvy bag, but it is the mechanism the act itself provides for sleeping under canvas away from the campsite, and it is the Gemeindevorstand's to grant. If you are a group, this is your paperwork.¹

Does a bivvy bag without a tent escape art. 64? Honest answer: untested, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The article says "das Campieren" and never defines it, unlike Pontresina, which spells camping out as putting up tents, caravans and motorhomes and thereby leaves a tentless sleeper arguably outside its own wording. Splügen leaves the word open and pairs it with parking vehicles for staying and sleeping, which reads as aimed at people settling in rather than at a person in a sleeping bag on a summit. That is a reading, not a permission. On ground that is clearly public, do not lean on it.

One communal rule that does apply to the walk up, with a real fine. Art. 4 of the Flur- und Weidegesetz der Gemeinde Rheinwald forbids driving over other people's land, and equally forbids "das Verlassen der Wege und das Betreten der Wiesen zur Zeit des Graswuchses", leaving the paths and entering the meadows during the growing season. Art. 10 sets the penalty at up to CHF 100, and up to CHF 1'000 if you repeat it. The target of that rule is hay meadow in the valley before the cut, not the grazed stony ground at 2'143 metres, but the instruction is simple and costs you nothing: stay on the path on the way up through the meadows, and save the off-path walking for the top.⁷

What I could not find, said plainly: any fee, and any arrangement. No honesty box, no rate people mention to the alp tenant, no designated corner anybody points visitors to. At other spots we publish the word-of-mouth figure because one genuinely exists and it is the most useful line in the article. Here there is nothing to publish, and inventing one would be worse than useless.

What the maps say, and where to actually sleep

The Tanatzhöhi is a 2'143 metre summit on the ridge south of Splügen, and the national gazetteer holds a summit point, a gondola station and an alp station all under that name, which is worth knowing before you follow a coordinate. The summit point sits at 46.53063 / 9.31374, LV95 2'743'847 / 1'154'978, and the federal height service gives 2'143.2 m for it. The gondola top station is about 41 metres east at 2'137 m, with the mountain restaurant beside it.⁴

Yes, there is a lift and a restaurant at the pin, and no, that does not settle the spot the way it usually would. Normally a top station is where this site stops and says: whatever the law allows, nobody actually wants to sleep here. The Tanatzhöhi is the exception, because the whole installation is a winter installation. Bergbahnen Splügen-Tambo runs the gondola in the ski season, and the mountain restaurant at 2'144 m is closed in summer. The alp roads that reach the top, mapped as Tanatz and Tamboalp, are gravel and sit under the commune's Fahrverbot for motor vehicles, so the public does not drive up. From roughly July to October what is up there is a shut station on an empty grazed ridge above the treeline, with Piz Tambo at 3'279 m across the valley. That is a place someone would genuinely sleep.⁸

Where to put the mat. Away from the station buildings and off the piste corridors, on the grassy shoulder of the ridge rather than on the service tracks. The ground is grazed alp, so pick a spot that is not the flattest and most obviously used bit of pasture, leave the gates as you find them, and be gone early. If cattle are on the summit pasture, move well off from them rather than negotiating around them at dusk. The Alpine Club's own standard is the one to hold yourself to here: a single considerate night above the treeline is normally unproblematic, and the same leaflet asks you not to bed down right next to a working alp without asking.¹⁰

Every federal protection layer came back empty at the point, and I made the emptiness mean something. No federal game reserve, no wildlife rest zone, no BLN object, no mire landscape, raised bog, fen, floodplain, amphibian site, dry grassland, forest reserve or biosphere reserve. Each query ran alongside a deliberately invalid layer id, which returns an HTTP 400, so an empty answer is a genuine absence and not a request that quietly failed. The commune layer, filtered to the current year, returns Rheinwald, and the same layer for 2018 and earlier returns Splügen, which is how I knew to go looking for the older act in the first place.⁴

Four boundaries lie near enough to name, and none of them reaches the summit. Measured off the returned geometry rather than eyeballed: the federal fen inventory object "Rietboden (Tamboalp)" is 813 metres south-southwest, the wildlife rest zone "Stockenenwald, Tambowald" is 950 metres north-northwest, the floodplain object "Tambogletscher" is 2'157 metres south-southwest, and BLN object 1907, "Quellgebiet des Hinterrheins - Passo del San Bernardino", is 6'336 metres away. The nearest federal game reserve is more than eight kilometres off. Walk south-southwest down towards the Tamboalp and you will eventually be in a protected fen, so do not drift that way looking for softer ground.⁴

The wildlife rest zone is worth one extra paragraph, because the commune tightened it recently. The Wildruhezonenreglement Rheinwald, issued by the Gemeindevorstand on 16 December 2025 and in force on enactment, lists "Stockenenwald, Tambowald" with a closed season of 1 December to 15 April, longer than the other four zones in the commune, which close on 20 December. During the closure the zone may not be entered and any off-path travel on skis, snowboard, sledge or snowshoes is prohibited, with marked corridors excepted. The fixed penalty is CHF 150. That is a winter rule about a forest almost a kilometre away, so it does not touch a summer night on the summit, but if you are up here on skis it is the rule that will actually cost you money.⁹

One layer does cover the summit, and it is not a restriction. The pin lies inside the perimeter of the Naturpark Beverin, a regional nature park of national importance. Park status of this kind rests on a charter between the canton and the member communes about how the region is developed; it is not an access regime and it carries no camping prohibition of its own. Being inside a regional nature park changes nothing about whether you may sleep here. It is worth knowing only because people see the park boundary on a map and assume it does.⁴

One currency flag, and this is the one that matters most on this page. The verdict here rests on a limitation, "auf öffentlichem Grund", that the commune has already voted to delete. The moment the cantonal government approves the Baugesetz Rheinwald 2025, art. 15 replaces art. 64, the public-ground limitation disappears, and camping outside camping zones becomes prohibited across the whole commune unless the commune grants one of the art. 15 para. 2 exceptions. As of 7 August 2026 that approval has not been published and the ÖREB cadastre still names the Splügen act. If you are reading this months later, that is the single thing to re-check, and the commune will tell you in one phone call.²³

Where you can legally sleep

• On non-public ground at the top, once the commune confirms what that means here. Art. 64 covers public ground only. Ask the Gemeinde Rheinwald on +41 81 664 11 28 whether the alp under the summit falls inside or outside that, and pitch on the answer rather than on the assumption¹.
• As a group, with a Gemeindevorstand authorisation. Art. 30 para. 4 of the Baugesetz Splügen lets the commune permit temporary tent camps outside the camping zone¹.
• Camping Splügen, Campingstrasse 18, 7435 Splügen, on the young Hinterrhein at the edge of the village, open year-round with pitches for tents as well as vans. This is the camping zone the article refers to, and the one place in the commune where none of the above is a question⁸.
• Not south-southwest towards the Tamboalp. The federal fen object "Rietboden" starts about 813 metres that way. Stay on the ridge.
• Not in winter off the marked corridors near Stockenenwald and Tambowald. Closed 1 December to 15 April, CHF 150 fixed penalty⁹.

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are allowed to sleep outside, and on a grazed alp with a lease-holder and cattle it applies twice over. It is not legal text, it is decency and common sense, and up here it is also the difference between a farmer who shrugs and a commune that writes a stricter rule.

• 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 August 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.

The central point of this article is time-sensitive by nature. The Baugesetz Rheinwald 2025 was adopted on 5 December 2025 and enters into force with the approval decision of the cantonal government; as of 7 August 2026 no approval date is published and the cantonal ÖREB cadastre still names the Baugesetz Splügen as binding for the parcel under the summit. When that changes, art. 15 replaces art. 64 and the public-ground limitation this verdict rests on disappears. 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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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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