Exploding Zurich Böögg predicts fine summer

The Zurich Böögg explodes after just under 13 minutes Keystone-SDA

The head of the traditional Böögg effigy exploded after 12 minutes and 48 seconds at Zurich's Sechseläuten festival, forecasting a fine summer ahead.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The Böögg exploded early, but hether it will be such a good summer remains to be seen. As a weather forecaster, the Böögg is not always very reliable.

At 6pm sharp, on the sixth stroke of the bells, the president of the canton of Graubünden, Martin Bühler, lit the log under the Böögg. Not all the guilds had arrived at Sechseläutenplatz by then. Bühler was slightly off the mark with his prediction of 18 minutes.

The sun was shining and the wind was light as the groups of guild riders circled the Böögg for the “Sechseläuten March”. After 10 minutes, the first firecrackers exploded and the flames snaked their way up to the Böögg. While the wood pile burned longer, the winter figure quickly went up in flames.

The celebrity guests of honour from the worlds of music and sport went down particularly well with the visitors, especially singer Beatrice Egli.

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]