Wild camping in Thun: the city allows you the night, and forbids you the tent

A city is not a spot, and this city still has the clearer rule

Start with the objection, because it is a fair one. Wild camping in Thun is not a question these reports are built for. The point of a legality check is to answer for a pitch: a specific patch of ground where somebody intends to lie down, with a coordinate attached, so that federal inventories, cantonal ordinances and communal reglements can all be tested against that one point. A city of forty-four thousand people is not a patch of ground. It is a zoning plan, a lakefront, an old town, a railway triangle and several hillsides, and the answer differs across all of them.

So the first thing to say is the obvious thing: nobody should read this as an invitation to camp in a city. If what you actually want is a night out above the Thunersee, skip to the last section, where the lawful options are.

The second thing to say is that Thun is a genuinely unusual case, and researching it turned up something better than the shrug the question deserved. Most Swiss communes say nothing at all about sleeping outdoors, which is why so many of these reports end up reasoning from silence. Thun says something. Its Ortspolizeireglement contains an article headed Übernachten im Freien, staying overnight in the open, and that article both permits and prohibits, in three short paragraphs.

"Das Übernachten in öffentlichen Parks und Anlagen ausserhalb des Gebietes der Altstadt gemäss Anhang 2 ist für eine Nacht gestattet."Art. 27 para. 2 of the Ortspolizeireglement der Stadt Thun (OPR, SSG 552.01): staying overnight in public parks and grounds outside the old-town area defined in annex 2 is permitted for one night.

Read that again, because the direction of it is unusual. This is not a commune tolerating something it never got round to banning. It is a commune deciding, in a reglement its own parliament voted through, that a person may spend a night in its parks. The Swiss default in these reports is a prohibition to be measured; here the default is a permission with a limit attached.

The version matters, and this is where the research nearly went wrong. The city's website still serves the old reglement of 27 June 2002, in which the same rule sits at art. 11a. That text was repealed outright by art. 54 of the total revision, adopted by the Stadtrat on 15 December 2022 and brought into force by the Gemeinderat on 1 May 2023. The provision in force today is art. 27, and anyone citing art. 11a is citing an article that no longer exists.¹

The tent is the line, and the line is drawn hard

Paragraph 3 is the one that decides this. It does not qualify the permission in paragraph 2 so much as sit beside it and remove the equipment.

"Das Aufstellen von Stühlen und Tischen sowie von Zelten oder Notdächern jeglicher Art zu Übernachtungszwecken ist auf öffentlichem Grund verboten."Art. 27 para. 3 OPR: putting up chairs and tables, as well as tents or emergency shelters of any kind, for overnight purposes, is prohibited on public ground.

So the shape of the answer is: the night yes, the shelter no. A bivvy bag on the grass of a lakeside park, arriving late and gone early, is the thing paragraph 2 permits. The same night with a tent over it is the thing paragraph 3 forbids. This site has argued for years that Swiss law keeps confusing those two activities, and that the distinction between sleeping out and camping is the whole game. Thun is one of the few places where a lawmaker has drawn that exact line on purpose.

The penalty is real but not dramatic. Art. 50 para. 1 lists art. 27 among the articles whose breach is punishable, with a fine "up to the maximum of cantonal legislation". That maximum is set by art. 58 para. 2 of the Bernese Gemeindegesetz at CHF 5'000 for reglements. Two things pull against the headline number: art. 50 para. 3 allows a warning instead of a fine in light cases, and the ceiling is a ceiling, not a tariff. Nothing in Thun's rules sets a fixed penalty for a tent.²

How far the tent ban really reaches

Here the honest answer needs both readings, because the text and the city's own explanation of the text do not point in quite the same direction.

On its face, paragraph 3 is unrestricted: it says auf öffentlichem Grund, on public ground, with no further limitation. On that reading a tent is prohibited anywhere on Thun's public ground, parks included, and the permission in paragraph 2 covers the sleeping but never the pitching.

The city's explanatory report tells a narrower story about why the words are there. Responding to consultation feedback that asked for the chairs-and-tables ban to be dropped, the report notes that this prohibition "refers to paragraph 1", the caravan and camper paragraph, and states its purpose in one sentence: to prevent a public parking lot from turning into a supposed campsite. The report also explains what drove the whole article, which was a post-Covid boom in camper vans, small weekend encampments near the lake at the Lindermatte, vehicles without toilets, and the resulting complaints from residents.³

Which reading wins? Almost certainly the text. An explanatory report is a materials source, not the enactment, and the remark about paragraph 1 was answering a specific objection about furniture rather than narrowing the words öffentlicher Grund. Nor does it help the tent case: even on the narrow reading, paragraph 2 permits das Übernachten, the staying overnight, and says nothing whatsoever that would authorise erecting a tent. There is no route through this reglement that ends with a lawful tent on public ground in Thun. What the report does establish is the target: this article was written at camper vans on parking lots, not at a walker with a bivvy bag, which is worth knowing if you are trying to guess how the city sees you.

One more piece of paragraph 27 that people ask about. Paragraph 1 permits one night in a caravan or camper on public parking lots, unless a temporary or permanent ban is signposted. That sentence exists because the consultation draft had banned it outright and the feedback pushed back; the signposting clause was added at the same time. So the sign on the parking lot is not decoration, it is the operative rule.³

What the maps add, and the one place they bite

Communal rules are only one of the three layers these reports check, so the federal inventories were queried across the commune rather than at a single point. Four points were sampled: the Schadaupark on the lakefront, the old town, the Gwatt shoreline in the south and the Goldiwil hillside in the east. Every query ran with a deliberately invalid layer alongside it, which returns HTTP 400, so that an empty result could be told apart from a broken one.⁴

Three of the four came back completely clean: no BLN site, no floodplain, no fen or raised bog, no mire landscape, no amphibian site, no dry grassland, no federal game reserve and no wildlife rest zone. For a built-up commune that is unsurprising, and it means the communal reglement really is the whole of the law at the lakeside parks.

The fourth point is the exception, and it is worth knowing about. The shoreline at Gwatt, at the southern end of the commune, lies inside federal waterbird reserve no. 108, Kanderdelta bis Hilterfingen, a reserve of national importance covering the lake basin from the Kander delta to Hilterfingen and the Aare outflow at Thun, including the Gwattlischenmoos. Its official object sheet describes it as an important breeding site for red-crested pochard and tufted duck and a wintering ground for black-necked grebe and goosander.⁵

What that reserve does and does not do is worth stating precisely, because federal reserves get invoked loosely. The general provisions in art. 5 WZVV were read in full: hunting is prohibited, animals may not be disturbed, driven away or lured out, feeding is prohibited, dogs must be kept on the lead, carrying weapons is prohibited, military exercises with live or blank ammunition are prohibited, taking off and landing with manned aircraft and operating unmanned ones are prohibited, and kitesurfing and model boats are prohibited. Camping does not appear on that list, and neither does sleeping. The reserve is not a camping ban.⁵

It is still the wrong place to try it. The prohibition on disturbing the birds is the operative one and a person settling in on the shore of a wintering ground is exactly the disturbance the reserve exists to prevent. And the Gwattlischenmoos is a wetland, which solves the question on its own for anyone hoping for dry ground.

Two limits on the permission that are easy to miss

The first is the old-town carve-out. Annex 2 of the reglement draws the perimeter, and it is small: the polygon wraps the old town between the two arms of the Aare, taking in the Obere Hauptgasse, the Rathausplatz and the castle, reaching north to the Sädel and dipping south over the Innere Aare towards the Aarefeld. The lakeside parks are well outside it; the Schadaupark sits roughly a kilometre and a half to the south-west. Inside that perimeter the permission in paragraph 2 simply does not apply.¹

The second is ownership. Everything in art. 27 is about öffentlicher Grund, public ground, and public parks and grounds. It says nothing about private land, which in a city is most of the land. On private ground the answer is the ordinary Swiss one: it is the owner's to give, and without their agreement you have no business being there overnight.⁶

Where you can actually sleep

Three honest options, in ascending order of how much this site would recommend them.

A bivouac in a lakeside park, without a tent. This is the thing the reglement permits, for one night, outside the old town, and it is legal on the face of the text. It is also a city park: lit, patrolled, mown, with people walking dogs at six in the morning. Nobody comes to Thun for that experience. If you are stranded and need somewhere lawful to lie down, it is genuinely useful to know it exists and that the city has written it down. As a plan for a night out, it is not one.

The campsite at Gwatt. There is an official campsite on the Thun shore at Gwatt, ten minutes from the town centre, open from late March to late October, with pitches, sanitary facilities and a bistro on the lake. If the goal is to sleep by the Thunersee with a tent, legally, this is the answer and it takes one booking.⁶

Go up. The reason the question is interesting is the reason the answer is disappointing: Thun is the gateway to the Bernese Oberland, and everything worth sleeping on is above it rather than in it. The ridge on the far side of the lake is the obvious move. The Sigriswiler Rothorn, high point of the Sigriswilergrat directly across the Thunersee, is unregulated for nine months of the year and prohibited only from 1 September to 30 November, and that is a very different night from a park bench.

One last note on how to be treated well here. The article that governs this was written because campers on a lakeside meadow left a mess and residents complained. That is the frame the city has for people sleeping outdoors, and it is not a hostile one, but it is a wary one. Arriving late, leaving nothing and being gone before the town wakes up is the entire difference between the thing Thun decided to permit and the thing it decided to stop.

General rules for wild camping

This applies wherever you are allowed to sleep outside, and in a city it matters more rather than less. The one article that governs Thun exists because a previous group of people left a mess by the lake.

• 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.

Communal reglements change, and this one changed recently: the reglement in force replaced a 2002 predecessor that the city's own website still serves, and its last article entered into force in March 2024. Check the current version in the city's collection before relying on any of this, 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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