More than 45,000 visit Château-d’Oex Swiss balloon festival

More than 45,000 visitors at the balloon festival in Château-d'Oex VD Keystone-SDA

More than 45,000 visitors attended this year's international balloon festival in Château-d'Oex in the Swiss canton of Vaud.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Thanks to “exceptional” weather conditions, it was possible to fly on seven of the nine festival days.

Some 350 balloon flights with a total of over 450 flight hours were completed, the organisers of the 46th Festival International de Ballons announced on Sunday.

Balloon flights transported 640 passengers while over 1,000 children experienced their first launch in a captive balloon.

A highlight of the festival took place on Thursday, when almost 40 balloons travelled together to the Gruyères region in the canton of Fribourg to take part in the precision competition. Balloons were dropped onto a target in the courtyard of Gruyères Castle.

A total of 81 launches were counted on Saturday. The balloons used a wind inversion close to the ground to return and land not far from the launch site, the festival organisers wrote.

In 2027, the balloon festival will take place in the Pays d’Enhaut from 23 to 31 January.

Adapted from German by AI/mga

How we work

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 [e-mail]