Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

In today’s briefing, a trio of quintessential Swiss issues – mountains, cows and drugs – takes us into the weekend. Your daily update from the Alps will return on Monday.

© Keystone / Gaetan Bally

In the news: big deal for Switzerland’s biggest watchmaker.

• Rolex is to buy luxury retailer Bucherer, it was announced today. Bucherer has more than 100 stores worldwide and will continue to operate independently, keep its name and sell other brands, Rolex said. The deal gives Rolex a foothold in the retail market for the first time; until now it has only operated a single store of its own, in Geneva.
• Five Chinese cultural assets, confiscated by Swiss border guards, are to head home after being returned to the Chinese ambassador in Bern yesterday. The objects include a vase, a coin and equestrian-themed statues and are between 2,000 and 400 years old. Artefacts were returned to Peru, Mexico and Egypt in similar circumstances over the past year.
• The Swiss economy saw continued job growth in the second quarter of 2023, according to statistics published today. The industry and service sectors posted an overall year-on-year increase of 2.2%, with the hotel and catering sector particularly expanding. At the same time, the number of open positions in the country fell by 2.3% to 124,700.

Keystone

Summer hike: 87,000 vertical metres in 44 days

What did you do on your summer holidays? Gabriel Jungo from canton Fribourg climbed every “four-thousander” in Switzerland, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports todayExternal link: in just 44 days, including eight lost to bad weather, the 23-year-old scaled all 48 Swiss-based peaks surpassing 4,000 metres above sea level. Jungo spent half a year training for his “project” and CHF12,000 ($13,560) carrying it out, the NZZ writes. He also made a point of doing it all – including valley transfers – on foot or by bike. As for what motivates him, the paper says it’s far from old romantic ideas of conquering nature’s epic heights; he simply likes to “get away from the daily stress” down in the plains. A normal summer holiday, then.

Keystone / Christof Schuerpf

City authorities faced with increasingly public habits.

Like many things in Switzerland, drugs are more or less tolerated – if you don’t disturb the peace. As such, “open air scenes” are currently worrying parents and experts alike. Geneva in particular, but also Zurich and Basel, are seeing an uptick in public drug-taking, especially of crack, RTS radio reported todayExternal link. As for the cause, the Zurich case is related to the recent closure of a drug centre; while in Geneva, numbers of crack users have been exploding due to the “hyper-availability of [very cheap] cocaine”, addiction specialist Frank Zobel told the radio. For him, the battle has already been lost in trying to control the supply side – the point now is to focus on solutions to better manage the habits of users, as Zurich famously did with heroin in the 1990s.

© Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller

Catch me if you can: cows throw off the yoke.

Swiss newswires have recently lit up with exciting tales of escaped cows: first a bovine near Bern got away from the butcher before being shot by police; then yesterday, a 650kg cow which had fled an abattoir near Geneva was “neutralised” after three days of glorious freedom. What’s going on? Are security standards slipping, or is it something more? Are the docile beasts planning a revolution? Have they reached a consciousness of their situation, from which they are – perhaps justifiably – trying to flee? Is it time for humans to learn that cows might not want to become burgers, but rather “want to live”, as a Berner ZeitungExternal link columnist wrote last week? Or are we still in the summer hole of scant hard news? Time will tell: tune in next week for the next cow-escape update.