Where the Swiss Go on Weekends: Into the Mountains

Aren’t the Swiss mountains stunning? And still, pictures never do these landscapes justice. I took this photo not long into a full-day hike. Les Paccots, Switzerland. May 11, 2024.

When I had visitors in Houston, I often heard surprised comments about seeing no one on the downtown sidewalks, even during the weekday.

Explaining that all the people roam the underground tunnels connecting the building and the parking instead always got me amazed responses.

In Switzerland, I get the same sort of comment, though this one about why the cities and towns feel so empty on the weekends.

Where did everyone go?

Swiss Mountains are the Nation’s Playground

Almost without seasonal exception, unless the conditions make it dangerous, the Swiss and Switzerland’s long-time residents leave early in the morning on Sunday (and some on Saturday, if schedules permit) to get up into the surrounding mountains.

They ski (all the flavors, from cross-country to downhill to ski-hiking), they snowshoe, they climb, they hike—they even combine a few activities in one go, when they can.

This means if you go to a Swiss train station around 7 or 8 a.m. on a weekend morning, you’ll find it overflowing with people wearing backpacks and charged with outdoor gear. And you’ll find the ones who didn’t stay in the mountains overnight returning around 6 or 7 p.m. the same day.

How to Join the Swiss in the Mountains

If you didn’t grow up in Switzerland and mountains aren’t something you know well, figuring out how to enjoy them isn’t obvious.

If you’re in Switzerland long term, consider joining the Club Alpine Swiss, which offers classes and organizes groups for excursions year-round. It’s a fantastic association, wonderfully organized, and the members are welcoming and knowledgeable and excited to get into the mountains and teach people about the mountains, too. I joined the club years ago and I have enjoyed every aspect of it.

If you’d like to hire a personal mountain guide to take you into the mountains for hiking, climbing, skiing, and snowshoeing, you can. A quick web search for “personal mountain guide Switzerland” turned up several. I haven’t hired a mountain guide before, so I can’t make any recommendations. What I can recommend is that you find someone certified to guide you. (Yes, official mountain guides require extensive training ahead of certification. You might need to pay more for a certified guide, but any extra cost to ensure you’re safe is beyond worthwhile.)

If you’d like a group activity in the mountains, you’ll find companies that offer group guided tours in Switzerland. I haven’t gone on any guided group tours, so I can’t recommend any guides or organizations that offer group tours for visitors, but you’ll find several options via a web search. As with hiring a personal guide, you should ensure for your own safety that the guide leading the group activity has certification for taking people up into the mountains.

If you’d like to take a class in a mountain activity, you’ll likewise find several schools offering classes in the many types of skiing and mountain climbing for visitors and Swiss residents. If you’d like to find a class on hiking, though, most of the classes have offerings only in the language of that region of Switzerland and the courses are often intensive. (Hiking courses cater to residents more than tourists.) If you live in Switzerland and would like to find a course on mountain sports that suits your level and interest, you can reach out to the Club Alpin Suisse for information on upcoming classes for members and contact Swiss Mountain Training, which has more than fifty years of experience training people in mountain activities.

If you’re experienced in mountain sports and activities, you’ll likely know how to get the information you need about routes, required equipment for the route and the weather, and current conditions. If not—or if you don’t have the information you need for where you’ll be in Switzerland—your best bet is to find an outdoors outfitter in the town where you’re staying that can give you the guidance you need. Switzerland has fantastic phone apps with maps and conditions and routes, but they’re complicated to navigate without guidance and not everything is in English.

Why Swiss Towns Seem Empty on Weekends

What this means is that, yep, the streets of the towns in Switzerland can often feel relatively vacant all weekend—or filled only with tourists.

Does this mean you need to go to the mountains if you visit Switzerland in the future? Well, no. Not necessarily.

But maybe you should.