Lucerne's carnival opens at five in the morning on Schmutziger Donnerstag with the Urknall, an explosion over the Kapellbrücke, after which Brother Fritschi arrives by boat and the city drinks until the following Tuesday. The sound of it is Guggenmusik: brass bands playing familiar tunes deliberately and loudly off-key, in grotesque masks and costume.
No attendance figure is collected in this pass.
The structural point worth knowing is confessional. Lucerne is Catholic and holds its carnival before Lent; Basel is Protestant and holds its after. The two cities are an hour apart and their carnivals never coincide, which is a scheduling convenience and a four-hundred-year-old theological argument at the same time.
PlanningEaster-linked — and unlike Basel it runs before Lent, which puts the two carnivals a week apart.