The Swiss alpine pasture season: inalpe to désalpe, as UNESCO and the Swiss list describe it

What UNESCO inscribed

The alpine pasture season is the summer on Switzerland's mountain pastures: between May and October, cattle, sheep and goats are driven up to high pastures to use the extra grass, and brought down again in autumn.[3] UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2023, with Switzerland as the only state.[1]

UNESCO's entry describes alpine farmers of all genders caring for the animals, maintaining the pastures, fences and buildings, making cheese and other products from the milk, and welcoming visitors, and it counts rituals, prayers and blessings, traditional clothing, livestock competitions and local festivities as part of the practice. It says the knowledge is mostly passed on informally, in families, among seasonal staff and in alpine societies and cooperatives, and also through training centres, cultural events and tourism.[1]

The Federal Office of Culture's entry on the Swiss list of living traditions, marked with the asterisk it uses for UNESCO inscriptions, adds two things UNESCO's text does not give: the altitude range, between 600 m and 2,900 m, and the history, a practice widely documented since the late Middle Ages.[2] Its longer detailed description, by Isabelle Raboud and Ernst Roth in a March 2024 version, is the source for most of what follows.[3]

Going up and coming down

The detailed description gives the ascent two regional names, poya in Fribourg and inalpe in Valais, and calls the descent the désalpe. The ascent is now mostly made by vehicle, it says, though some farmers who want to keep the tradition still walk part of the way; the descent, too, is often made by vehicle. For the ascent, cows are crowned with decorative bells and, in some regions, wear elaborately decorated leather collars; for the descent they are decorated with flowers and bells, and herders and their families walk with them in traditional dress. Some herds are paraded through villages as part of désalpe festivities, while other farmers simply mark the end of the season with family and neighbours.[3]

The same text explains why there is no fixed calendar: the date the herd goes up is decided by each alpine farmer, according to the vegetation and the weather, and through the summer the herd is moved between pastures at different altitudes as the grass grows. Between the two moves it lists other festivals, Mi-Été (midsummer) or Kilbi and, in German-speaking Switzerland, Suufsunntig, Älplerfeste, Bergdorfet and Meisterkuh.[3]

XTOUR has not read a 2026 or 2027 désalpe programme for any village and does not give dates or places.

Cheese on the alp

The description says the vast majority of Swiss alpine pastures lie between 1,000 m and 2,900 m and were cleared in the Middle Ages, and that around a third of them are used for cheese production today. Alpine cheese-making differs from a valley dairy: the milk is heated over a wood fire, the cheesemaker manages daily changes in milk quality with the weather and the state of the pasture, and the cheese is lifted and pressed in a cloth. Nationally it is a minority activity, a few per cent of Swiss cheese production, and the description credits the protected-origin register with helping to keep it going.[3]

Several names on the Federal Office for Agriculture's register of protected designations of origin are alpine cheeses by name or by producer group: Berner Alpkäse / Berner Hobelkäse, Formaggio d'alpe ticinese, Glarner Alpkäse, and L'Etivaz, whose group is the cooperative of L'Etivaz alpine-cheese producers.[5] A further name, St. Galler Alpkäse / Liechtensteiner Alpkäse, is listed as a pending application.[5] For Gruyère, the register's application summary protects "Gruyère d'alpage" as a whole name, while the word "alpage" on its own is not protected.[6] The labels themselves are explained in Swiss AOP and IGP names.

The history in the detailed description is about cheese as much as cows: it cites documents from Gruyère in the early 14th century, the Académie française's 1762 entry for "Gruyère", and the historian Johannes Stumpf, who described Sbrinz and Berner Alpkäse in 1548.[3]

Who works there

The description describes a team for the summer: a supervisor and a master cheesemaker or herdsman or herdswoman, with employees or family members; young people join as chalet girls and boys in the school holidays, and paid seasonal workers come from other European countries too. It also lists the pressures on the practice: finding staff, reconciling heritage and hygiene rules with efficient work, low profitability, the return of wolves, lynx and bears, competition from wild grazing animals, and, in its words, "growing numbers of tourists, hikers, and – more recently – cyclists".[3] XTOUR's reading is that a visitor on an alpine path is crossing someone's workplace for the summer.

The alphorn and the World Heritage sites

Two links need care.

The Federal Office of Culture's description is explicit about the alphorn: it says the instrument "is not a customary part of the Alpine pasture season", though it appears in the herdsmen's procession at the Fête des Vignerons in Vevey and players perform at events. Music that does belong to the season, in the same text, includes the Ranz des vaches and a large choral and yodelling repertoire.[3] The alphorn has its own entry on the Swiss list; see yodelling and the alphorn in Switzerland.

UNESCO's element page links the practice to three World Heritage sites, Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch, the Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona and Monte San Giorgio, under the heading "World Heritage site potentially related".[1] That is UNESCO's own weak relation. It does not say that alpine pastures lie inside those properties or that the practice is part of them, and XTOUR does not say so either. The sites themselves are listed in Switzerland's World Heritage sites.

For the other Swiss elements on UNESCO's lists, see Switzerland's intangible heritage.