Holidays in Switzerland

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Switzerland

The Zytglogge: Bern's Astronomical Clock Tower

Originally built around 1218 to 1220 as the western gate in Bern's medieval fortifications, the tower known as the Zytglogge only became a timepiece after a fire heavily damaged the structure in 1405. Rebuilt and eventually fitted with an elaborate astronomical dial, the tower gained its definitive clockwork in 1530, when a local craftsman named Kaspar Brunner, who had no prior experience as a horologist, won the contract to construct a new movement. That mechanism, remarkably, still keeps time in the tower today, making it one of the oldest continuously operating clock mechanisms in Switzerland.

From the 16th through the 19th centuries the Zytglogge served as Bern's authoritative civic clock, against which every other timepiece in the city was set, and it doubled as the fixed point from which travel distances along the canton's roads were measured. Its astronomical dial displays not only the hour but also the position of the sun and moon among the stars, and every hour a small mechanical parade of figures performs above the main clock face. A young patent clerk named Albert Einstein, who worked nearby and lived just steps from the tower between 1902 and 1909, is often said to have drawn inspiration from watching the Zytglogge's bells and dials while developing his early ideas about the nature of time.

How a Ban on Jewelry Created an Industry

Geneva's watchmaking tradition traces back to an unlikely source, religious austerity. In the mid 16th century the reformer John Calvin, who had settled in Geneva and gained enormous influence over the city's laws, pushed through sumptuary regulations restricting the wearing of ostentatious jewelry, leaving the city's many goldsmiths and jewelers suddenly without much of their usual market. Because clocks and watches were classified as practical, scientific instruments rather than decorative luxury, they fell outside the new restrictions, and craftsmen redirected their skills in gold work and fine engraving toward building and decorating timepieces instead.

The transformation accelerated as waves of Huguenot refugees, many of them experienced watchmakers, fled religious persecution in France during the later 16th century and settled in Geneva and the nearby Jura mountains, bringing additional technical expertise with them. Within a few decades the trade had grown substantial enough that Geneva's watchmakers organized themselves into a formal guild in 1601, one of the earliest such professional bodies dedicated specifically to watchmaking anywhere in Europe, laying institutional groundwork for an industry that would come to define the region's economy for centuries afterward.

Neuchâtel's Observatory and the Business of Precise Time

Founded in 1858 by the canton of Neuchâtel's department of public economy, the Cantonal Observatory of Neuchâtel was built for an unusually practical purpose among astronomical institutions, serving the region's watchmaking industry directly. Rather than existing purely for stargazing, the observatory certified the accuracy of chronometers submitted by local manufacturers and, using a meridian telescope to fix the precise moment of local solar time, distributed that exact time by telegraph to watchmaking workshops across the canton.

Adolphe Hirsch, the observatory's first director, spent roughly three years setting up and calibrating the chain of instruments needed for this time service before it became fully operational. In the following century, the observatory's chronometer testing competitions became internationally significant events within the watch trade, drawing entries from watchmakers as far away as Japan by the 1960s, before the trials eventually ended in 1968 amid disagreements among Swiss manufacturers over the rules governing outside competitors.

August 22, 1864: The Convention That Founded Modern Humanitarian Law

Prompted by the Geneva businessman Henry Dunant, who had witnessed the horrific aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 with no organized system to care for the wounded, representatives of twelve nations gathered in Geneva and signed a landmark treaty on August 22, 1864. Known as the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, the agreement guaranteed neutrality for medical personnel, hospitals and ambulances regardless of which side they served, and it adopted a red cross on a white background, the reverse of the Swiss flag, as the internationally recognized emblem of protected medical services.

The 1864 convention became the founding legal text of what developed into modern international humanitarian law and gave rise to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had itself been established the previous year. Dunant went on to share the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 for his role in the effort, and the principles first codified that August afternoon in Geneva were later expanded through additional conventions covering naval warfare, prisoners of war and civilians, forming the basis of the broader Geneva Conventions still in force today.

A Calendar Divided by Faith

When Pope Gregory XIII introduced the reformed calendar in 1582, Switzerland's patchwork of independent cantons responded according to religion rather than as one nation. Catholic cantons largely adopted the new calendar beginning in January 1584, while Protestant cantons such as Zurich and Bern refused for well over a century, viewing the change as an unwelcome papal imposition, so that different parts of the country ran on calendars ten, and eventually eleven, days apart.

The mismatch caused genuine economic disruption in mixed or contested areas. In the village of Bivio, a trading stop on a major alpine route whose parish split along the new calendar line in 1584, taverns, warehouses and stables serving long distance trade suddenly had to observe two separate sets of religious holidays, cutting into the working days available to merchants passing through. Geneva and most remaining Protestant cantons finally switched to the Gregorian calendar around January 1701, but full unification took far longer still, and the communes of Schiers and Grüsch in Graubünden did not convert until 1812, making them among the very last places in Western Europe to adopt the calendar the rest of the continent had used for over two centuries.

Jost Bürgi: The Clockmaker Who Discovered Logarithms

Born in 1552 in the small village of Lichtensteig, Jost Bürgi trained as a clockmaker and instrument builder before entering the service of Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse Kassel in 1579, where he worked alongside the court's astronomical observatory. There Bürgi invented the cross beat escapement, a mechanism roughly twenty times more accurate than the clockwork common at the time, allowing his clocks to lose or gain only about a minute a day rather than the twenty or thirty minutes typical of contemporary timepieces.

Around 1603 Bürgi moved to Prague to become imperial clockmaker at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, where he later assisted the astronomer Johannes Kepler with the demanding calculations required for accurate planetary tables. Independently of the Scottish mathematician John Napier, and apparently developing the idea somewhat earlier, Bürgi devised a system of logarithms to simplify exactly these kinds of laborious astronomical computations, though he published his tables only belatedly, in 1620, by which point Napier's work had already become widely known. Bürgi died in Kassel in 1632, remembered today as one of the rare figures whose precision engineering and mathematical insight advanced both the practical art of timekeeping and the abstract tools astronomers used to understand the heavens.

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