Basel Carnival kicks off with traditional ‘Morgestraich’
Basel's carnival kicked off in the early hours of Monday morning with the traditional "Morgestraich". At 4am, the lights went down and the cliques took to the streets of the northern Swiss city with their satirical lanterns, to the sound of piccolos and drums.
Select your language
Generated with artificial intelligence.
Listening:
Basel Carnival kicks off with traditional ‘Morgestraich’
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
The weather was relatively good and thousands of people flocked to see the show, as observed by a journalist from the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA.
The event kicked off in Basel dialect with the drum-majors of the cliques playing “Morgestraich, vorwärts Marsch!”. The first major procession took place in the afternoon.
Global instability, wars and the hostile attitude of US President Donald Trump are at the heart of the themes for the 2026 edition.
The Basel Carnival is the largest in Switzerland. It has been a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage site since 2017.
More
‘We’ve lost half the group!’ Swiss Abroad visit the carnival in Basel
What is your opinion? Join the debate:
External Content
Adapted from French by AI/ts
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch
External Content
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.