62 festivals filed · 62 with full entries · 3 with a sourced attendance figure
Country pass 04 · 62 entries, Q-CH-001 to Q-CH-062
Four passes in, the axis that separates countries has been how their dates are set: France schedules, Italy inherits, Spain is governed by Easter. Switzerland introduces a fourth thing, and no previous country has needed it.
A Swiss festival can have a perfectly sound recurrence rule and still not happen. White Turf is anchored to the first three Sundays of February and is raced on a frozen lake whose ice thickness is measured and published before each meeting; warm winters have cancelled it. The Snow Polo World Cup has the same dependency on the same lake. The Engadin Skimarathon crosses two frozen lakes. The balloon festival at Château-d'Œx exists because of a valley microclimate and flies only when it holds. Every désalpe in the country is set by the grass and the weather at 1,800 metres and is announced a few weeks ahead.
The Codex records a recurrence class and a swing. It has no field for and only if the lake freezes, and six Swiss entries need one.
Basel is Protestant and holds its Fasnacht after Ash Wednesday. Lucerne is Catholic and holds its before. The two cities are an hour apart and their carnivals have never coincided in four hundred years.
Basel's is the more precisely bounded event in this atlas: it begins at exactly 04:00 on the Monday following Ash Wednesday, when every light in the city centre is switched off, and runs for exactly 72 hours. UNESCO inscribed it in 2017.
The same confessional geography repeats at the southern border. Chiasso follows the Roman rite and finishes on Shrove Tuesday; Milan, thirty minutes away, keeps the Ambrosian rite, whose carnival ends on the Saturday after Ash Wednesday. Two Italian-speaking carnivals, one short train ride apart, ending four days apart every year.
The Fête des Vignerons at Vevey is the most extreme recurrence in the Codex. It has been held twelve times in 228 years: 1797, 1819, 1833, 1851, 1865, 1889, 1905, 1927, 1955, 1977, 1999, 2019. A temporary arena is built on the market square, some 5,500 amateur performers from the Lavaux perform a work written for that edition and never repeated, and then it is dismantled.
UNESCO inscribed it in 2016. Around 400,000 people attended the 2019 edition.
It appears on the Masters of Luxury Travel Swiss calendar under May, as though it were an annual spring event. A reader following that will not find it in most years of their life — and this is the single clearest demonstration of why cyclic has to be a property of an entry rather than a footnote.
The Swiss page is the most accurate of the four processed. After the Italian renderer defect, we checked for a systematic month shift and found none: Art Basel is under June, Montreux under July, Locarno and the Street Parade under August, Zibelemärit under November, the Escalade under December. All correct.
Four genuine errors:
Plus a fifth of a different kind: Sion Festival filed in June, actually August–September. The last three look like on-sale or programme-announcement dates recorded as event dates — a distinct class of error from Italy's, and one that sends a reader months early rather than weeks.
Three rows on the Swiss page are not events:
A prelude, an opening and a closing, each filed as though a reader could attend it. And Weltklasse Zürich appears twice, under May and August; there is one meeting, in late August or early September.
These are worth naming as a class because they are invisible to a month check — each row is plausible and most of them are even in a month something happened.
Three figures of sixty-two, and the pattern across four countries now reads:
| | France | Italy | Spain | Switzerland | |---|---|---|---|---| | Entries | 79 | 92 | 82 | 62 | | With a sourced figure | 33 | 6 | 1 | 3 | | Visitor-origin blocks | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
The three Swiss figures are the Street Parade at around 900,000 participants on a public street, Paléo at around 230,000 admissions, and the Fête des Vignerons at around 400,000 for an edition held once a generation. All three are press-reported rather than audited, and all three are recorded as such.
Visitor origin is empty for all sixty-two. The obvious candidate is Basel — a Christmas market and an art fair in a city on the corner of three countries, with a weekend crowd that is substantially German and French and entirely uncounted.
January belongs to the mountains and to money: Davos sealed off for the Forum, the Lauberhorn under the Eiger, polo and balloons on frozen surfaces. February and March are carnival, moving with Easter in two confessional directions at once, and the Romansh children of the Engadin ringing cowbells on 1 March.
April is Zurich burning a snowman and timing the explosion, and Appenzell voting by show of hands in a square. June is Art Basel, which sets the world's art prices in about four hours. July and August are the great music months — Montreux, Paléo, Verbier, Lucerne, Locarno's open-air square — and the Street Parade, which puts close to a million people around the Zurich lake basin for free in one day.
September and October bring the cattle down from the high pastures in flowers and bells, village by village, on dates nobody can print in advance. November is Bern selling fifty tonnes of onions from four in the morning. December is a procession of lit paper mitres through Küssnacht on the fifth, Geneva smashing chocolate cauldrons on the twelfth, and Davos taken over a second time for the hockey.
It is the most reliable festival calendar in the network and the one most frequently cancelled by weather — which are not contradictory statements, and the schema has room for only the first.