Notre Vie en Suisse: Désalpe

Switzerland, like any country, has its folk traditions. None, though, is more quintessentially Swiss than the désalpe (also called the cow parade).

This is the day when the cows (and sheep and people) descend from their summer pastures and dwellings high in the mountains (alps) to their winter pastures in the valley. People and their livestock have been doing this in Switzerland at least since the 4th century. And the Swiss Alps look the way they look today (no forest, just cleared pastures everywhere except the rockiest peaks) because of this practice, which is sometimes called "transhumance" (a word none of us knew before a few weeks ago).

Yesterday we had the great pleasure of seeing the désalpe in Charmey. We're not sure how much the désalpe is still a practical act of moving people and livestock (the illusion was shaken a bit when we saw the cows being loaded onto trucks at the end of the parade route), but it doesn't really matter. Cows still are big, big business in this part of the world (this is the HQ of Gruyere cheese), earlier in our stay we walked through cow herds at higher elevations than they'd be able to stay at all winter (see our post about our Alpen Tower walk), désalpe festivals can be found in many Swiss towns in late September and early October, and the whole thing was super fun, and even moving, to watch.

Charmey's désalpe is a very popular event. There is just a single, two-lane road into the tiny town, and that road and the only official parking area were both packed. Neither the road nor the parking area were designed to handle the volume of traffic that comes to town for this festival. Almost everything in Switzerland is well managed and well organized, but event parking is not one of their strong suits. To be fair, this is a mountain town with very limited flat space to convert into massive parking lots, but, still, driving into town and parking were kind of stressful. Fortunately, we got there early enough that we found a spot on a side road about a mile outside the town. We took that spot rather than sit longer in the bumper-to-bumper traffic heading into town and the one official parking lot, which probably would have been full by the time we got to it. We're not sure what people did who arrived after there were no more parking spots in the lot or, for that matter, within 2 miles of the town.

Charmey's main street on the day of desalpe

Unlike the parking, the festival itself was super well organized, with a troupe of decked-out cows and their people parading through town every 30 minutes between 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. (or, as they say here, 15:00), with music and other fun stuff happening in between. We arrived just in time to see the first of the troupes making their way into town.

Leading the Desaple in Charmey

Desalpe in Charmey

One of the most amazing aspects of the désalpe was the sound. All the cows had bells. Here's a video, with sound. Wow!

Part of the fun was the cows' dress. Many of them wore lovely flower and pine headpieces.

Look out Carmen Miranda!

Sheep on parade!

Musicians performed between the parades. The highlight here was the Coeur des Alpes, a famous group that plays these really long wooden horns (called alphorns) that at one time were used to communicate across the mountains and valleys. Click on the third picture below to hear the fabulous sound.