The Swiss list of living traditions: who keeps it and how it differs from UNESCO

What the list is

The list of living traditions in Switzerland is the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage: customs, festivals, music, crafts and knowledge that are passed on between generations. The Federal Office of Culture compiled it in 2012 with the cantons and updated it for the second time in 2023; its home page says 29 new entries took the total to 228.[1] The office's FAQ gives the reason it exists: when Switzerland ratified UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, it undertook to compile an inventory of its living traditions.[2]

Its site, lebendige-traditionen.ch, has German, French, Italian and English versions, and the list can be browsed from A to Z, by canton, or by the five UNESCO domains: knowledge concerning nature, oral expressions, performing arts, social practices and traditional craftsmanship.[3][1] The site also has a calendar of events; XTOUR does not take dates from it.

Who chose the entries

The list was built from the cantons up. According to the FAQ, at the end of May 2011 the Federal Office of Culture presented 387 traditions that the cantonal culture offices had nominated. A steering committee headed by the office, with federal and cantonal representatives, members of the Swiss UNESCO Commission, Pro Helvetia and other experts, assessed each one, and in October 2011 the 167 it had chosen went back to the cantons for approval before publication; Lucerne University of Applied Sciences coordinated the work.[2] The two later updates brought the list to its present 228.[1]

The FAQ adds that the Federal Office of Culture supports safeguarding projects, and that a project must relate to one or more traditions on the list.[2]

How it differs from UNESCO's lists

The Swiss list and UNESCO's lists do different jobs. UNESCO keeps international lists such as the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; the Swiss list is the national inventory that the Convention requires of every signatory state. The FAQ draws the link precisely: only a tradition on the national list can be put forward for UNESCO's lists, but a place on the Swiss list does not lead to a UNESCO inscription automatically.[2]

The list's entry pages mark UNESCO-inscribed traditions with an asterisk, explained on the page as "Inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the UNESCO".[5] When the A-Z list was read on 2026-10-09, nine entries carried the asterisk: alpine pasture season, alpinism, avalanche risk management, Basel Carnival, dry stone walling, the Holy Week processions in Mendrisio, watchmaking, mechanical musical automata and music boxes, and the Winegrowers' Festival in Vevey.[4]

Two details show that the lists are not one-to-one:

• Yodelling. UNESCO inscribed yodelling in 2025, but the Swiss entry "Natural yodeling and yodel songs" carried no asterisk when read.[6][7]
• Watchmaking. UNESCO has one element, the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics; the Swiss list has two asterisked entries for it, one for watchmaking and one for mechanical musical automata, music boxes and singing birds.[14][13][15]

UNESCO's Switzerland page also counts traditional irrigation and the cathedral workshops (Bauhütten) among its 11 elements; neither appears among the asterisked Swiss entries.[4][15] The UNESCO side is set out entry by entry in Switzerland's intangible heritage: what UNESCO lists.

What an entry contains

Each entry page has a short description, a longer detailed description as a PDF, its UNESCO domains, its canton or cantons, a list of connected traditions, links and a contact; the Basel Carnival entry, for instance, gives the Fasnachts-Comité as its contact.[5]

The list is not limited to folklore. Next to carnivals and processions, the A-Z list includes Aare swimming in Bern, the bears in Bern, the Zibelemärit, Basel drumming and Vogel Gryff, consensus-seeking and direct democracy, the demoscene and the Zurich techno scene.[4] A few entries show the kind of detail the pages hold:

• Sechseläuten, Zurich. The entry describes the guilds parading in historical costume on the third Monday in April and the burning of the Böögg, a snowman figure packed with explosives, at the Sechseläuteplatz; the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds has organised it since 1893.[8]
• L'Escalade, Geneva. The entry recalls the Duke of Savoy's failed night assault of 11 December 1602, says the celebration took shape from 1603 and the smashing of chocolate cauldrons only from 1881, and places the costumed events on the weekend closest to 11 December.[9] See L'Escalade: what the Swiss list says.
• Lausanne cathedral night watchman. First recorded in 1405, the watchman once warned of fires; the entry says he still calls out the hours every night of the year, and that a 1960 proposal to drop the tradition drew a month of protest letters.[10]
• Book culture in St Gallen. The entry runs from the manuscripts of the early medieval monastery through the reformer Vadian's library, which became the foundation of the Vadiana cantonal library, to the book designers and typographers who have worked in the city since.[11]
• Drawing lots for alpine pastures, Obwalden. In five of the canton's seven municipalities pastures are allocated by lot where demand exceeds supply; in Kerns the balls are drawn from a butter churn, and at the last draw there, in 2019, half the applicants went away with nothing.[12]

These are the Federal Office of Culture's descriptions. A date or time in an entry describes the custom; it is not an announcement for a particular year, and XTOUR has not read organisers' programmes for 2026 or 2027.

Related articles: the alpine pasture season, Basel Carnival, yodelling and the alphorn and the Fête des Vignerons in Vevey.