The Swiss tent ban that does not exist: the three-walls rule, checked against the law

A comment under one of our reels claimed that a tent is not allowed in most Swiss cantons, and that a shelter may have at most three walls and no roof. It collected likes faster than any correction could. So we did what we do for every spot: we pulled the written rules.

No Swiss provision, federal, cantonal or communal, limits a shelter to three walls, and no canton bans the tent as such. The one federal camping norm prohibits free tenting and camping inside the 42 federal game reserves, at CHF 150.1 Everywhere else the question is decided by the commune and by mapped protected areas. Where a written rule does separate the tent from the bivouac, it does it by naming the tent, never by counting walls.3

Where the three-walls rule comes from

The rule has a home, and it is not Switzerland. In German bushcraft and trekking forums, years of debate about what counts as pitching a tent under German state forest laws produced a piece of shorthand: a tarp open on one side is not a tent, so it must be legal. Repeated often enough, the shorthand hardened into pseudo-law and picked up variants as it travelled, three walls, no floor, no roof, depending on who was retelling it.

No German statute contains it either, even German guidance treats the tarp as a grey zone that depends on the authority reading it. The Swiss version is easier to settle, because here we can simply look. Across the texts behind our eighty-plus spot reports, federal ordinances, cantonal acts, communal police regulations, reserve rules, no provision measures a shelter by its walls. Not one, in any of the country’s languages.

The version in the comment, three walls and no roof, also fails on its own terms. A bivy bag has no walls at all. A tarp is nothing but roof. A three-walled windbreak under open sky is the one construction nobody actually carries up a mountain. A rule that cannot describe any real shelter was never written by a legislator, and it reads like it.

What the written law actually contains

Federal law first. Switzerland has no wild camping act. Forest and pasture are in principle open to everyone under art. 699 of the Civil Code, and exactly one federal norm addresses camping by name: inside the 42 federal game reserves, free tenting and camping is prohibited, fixed penalty CHF 150.1 That provision bans an activity inside a mapped area. It says nothing about construction, and it covers a defined set of districts, not most of the country.

The cantonal layer is where the claim would have to live, and it is almost empty. For canton Bern we pulled all 704 acts in force and searched them: not one carries camping or bivouacking in its article text.6 The pattern repeats where we have looked. The Valais-wide ban the internet keeps repeating does not exist either: on contact with the sources it dissolves into communal rules and protected areas.7

What remains is the layer people skip: the commune and the mapped protected areas. That is also how the Swiss Alpine Club frames it: a single considerate night by a small group above the treeline is usually unproblematic, the legal situation is not uniform, ask the commune.2 None of that distinguishes a tent from a bivy bag. It distinguishes ground from ground.

Where the tent really is written into law

Here is the kernel of truth. A handful of communal texts do single out the tent, and there the wording decides everything. Vals bans camping across its whole territory and then exempts the bivouac on mountain tours by name, so a tent needs a permit there and a bivy bag does not.3 Kandersteg defines camping so that the night without a tent, in an igloo or in a snow cave, falls outside its ban.4

Thun runs the other way, and it is the closest thing Switzerland has to a rule about roofs: on public ground the city permits spending the night but prohibits putting up tents or makeshift roofs of any kind.5 The one Swiss norm that mentions a roof bans it. Nobody, anywhere, counts walls.

And the split runs in reverse just as often. Of the 28 protected areas in Bern’s cantonal annex that carry a camping clause, 27 prohibit camping and bivouacking together, and at the Oeschinensee the one gap a tent-focused rule left open was closed with a court-backed prohibition on the lakeside meadows.6 Dropping the tent is not a legal trick. It works exactly where a written rule says it works, and nowhere else.

The claim, line by line

Each sentence from the comment, held against the written rules. The links go to the reports where we read the actual texts.

The sentence to keep

Swiss law regulates where you may sleep, almost never what you sleep under. Where a rule does care about the shelter, it names the tent in plain words, and the one norm that mentions a roof is a city banning them. If someone cites the three-walls rule at you, ask for the article number. There is none.

Is a tent allowed when wild camping in Switzerland?
The law decides by ground, not by gear. Outside the protected areas and outside communes with a written rule of their own, the tent is as legal as the bivy bag. Inside them, the ban usually catches both. Check the commune and the federal protected-area layers before the night, not the number of walls.
Does any Swiss law limit a shelter to three walls?
No. The rule appears in no federal ordinance, no cantonal act and no communal regulation we have ever pulled, in any language. It comes from German tarp debates and has no statutory basis there either.
Is a bivy bag legal where a tent is banned?
Only where the rule is written that way. Vals exempts the bivouac by name and Kandersteg writes the tentless night out of its camping definition, but 27 of 28 camping clauses in Bern’s protected-area annex ban bivouacking too, and the Oeschinensee closed its tentless gap with a separate court-backed prohibition. Read the wording, never assume it.
Which law bans tents in the federal game reserves?
Art. 5 para. 1 lit. e of the federal ordinance on game reserves: free tenting and camping is prohibited, official campsites reserved. The fixed penalty is CHF 150 under no. 12005 of the Fixed Penalties Ordinance. It applies inside the 42 mapped districts, not countrywide.

Sources

  1. Verordnung über die eidgenössischen Jagdbanngebiete (VEJ, SR 922.31), art. 5 para. 1 lit. e, consolidated version of 1 February 2025: "Das freie Zelten und Campieren ist verboten. Vorbehalten bleibt die Benutzung offizieller Zeltplätze. Die Kantone können Ausnahmen bewilligen." Free tenting and camping is prohibited, official campsites reserved, cantons may grant exceptions. The fixed penalty is CHF 150 under the Ordnungsbussenverordnung (OBV, SR 314.11), annex 2 no. 12005. The provision applies inside the 42 federal game reserves and contains no definition of a shelter’s construction. fedlex.admin.ch. ↩
  2. Swiss Alpine Club (SAC), information sheet "Campieren und Biwakieren". Defines bivouacking as an overnight stay without a tent, under the open sky, in an igloo or in a snow cave, and camping as a night in a small tent outside official campsites. States that a single overnight stay by a small group above the treeline is usually unproblematic if done considerately, that the legal situation in Switzerland is not uniform, and recommends asking the commune. Contains no rule about walls or roofs and no claim that tents are banned in most cantons. sac-cas.ch. ↩
  3. Polizeiverordnung der Gemeinde Vals, in force since 1 May 1974, art. 7: camping outside designated places is forbidden across the whole communal territory without a permit from the Gemeinderat, and the same article closes with an express exception for the bivouac in the course of individual mountain tours. The worked example of a tent needing a permit while the bivy bag is written out of the ban. Bad Ragaz shows the mild end of the same communal layer: its camping regulation expressly tolerates the occasional single tent. our Guraletschsee report. ↩
  4. Gemeindepolizeireglement Kandersteg, in force since 1 January 2021: art. 7 para. 1 forbids camping outside designated places, fined up to CHF 5,000 under art. 26 and tariffed at CHF 200, while art. 6 lit. c expressly excludes sleeping outdoors without a tent, in an igloo or in a snow cave from the definition of camping. At the Hohtürli the commune boundary and the federal game reserve meet within metres, so the tent is banned on both sides of the pass while the tentless night is lawful on one. our Hohtürli report. ↩
  5. Ortspolizeireglement der Stadt Thun, art. 27: para. 2 permits spending a night on public ground, para. 3 prohibits putting up tents or emergency roofs of any kind for overnighting purposes. The rare Swiss norm that mentions a roof at all, and it bans one rather than requiring its absence. our Thun report. ↩
  6. Canton Bern, full-corpus check: all 704 cantonal acts in force were retrieved and searched, and none contains camping or bivouacking in its article text. The cantonal protected-area annex carries 28 areas with a camping clause, 27 of which read "free camping and bivouacking are forbidden"; the single tent-only entry, Justistal, is a drafting relic from 2018, not a bivouac permission. our Sigriswiler Rothorn report. ↩
  7. Valais: no canton-wide camping ban exists. The often-repeated claim dissolves, on contact with the sources, into communal regulations and protected areas; at Lac d’Emosson the researched result is a lawful night. Read for our Emosson report. our Emosson report. ↩