Switzerland’s great city festivals are loud, early and fiercely local — Basel’s carnival, which starts in darkness at four in the morning and runs for exactly 72 hours, and Bern’s onion market, which fills the capital’s old town on a Monday in November.
Photo: Claude TRUONG-NGOC, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The two festivals in this atlas come from Switzerland’s German-speaking cities. Basel Fasnacht, inscribed by UNESCO in 2017, is the largest carnival in the country and starts on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, a week later than most carnivals. The Zibelemärit in Bern is a farmers’ market turned folk festival, held every year on the fourth Monday in November.
Both are proudly local: Basel’s carnival helps keep the city’s dialect alive, and Bern’s market grew from the farm women of the Seeland and the canton of Fribourg, who brought their onions to town in the nineteenth century.
On the fourth Monday of November, farmers bring tonnes of braided onions and garlic into Bern, and the Swiss capital’s old town turns into a mix of farmers’ market and folk festival — from before dawn until a confetti battle in the afternoon.
November 23, 2026Calculated
Basler Fasnacht
At exactly four o’clock on the Monday morning after Ash Wednesday, Basel switches off its lights and thousands of masked piccolo players and drummers march out behind glowing lanterns — the start of 72 hours of satire, confetti and music that UNESCO lists as world heritage.
February 15 – 17, 2027Calculated