Switzerland travel health
Required is not recommended: the first is what the border asks about, the second is what a clinic would suggest. Both, for Switzerland, then the number to dial and what care costs a visitor. Applies to every guide in Switzerland: Interlaken & the Bernese Oberland, Zermatt, Lucerne, Grindelwald, Zurich, St. Moritz and 3 more.
Required to enter
Nothing. No vaccination certificate is asked for at the border.
Recommended
- Tetanus up to date
- Tick-borne encephalitis for a summer in forest below 1,500m
Emergency number
144 for an ambulance, 1414 for mountain rescue (Rega)
Care for visitors
Excellent and cheap
Among the best in the world, and among the most expensive. Treatment is billed and there is no free emergency care for visitors — the EHIC covers EU citizens, everybody else needs insurance. Rega, the air rescue service, will fly you off a mountain and will invoice for it.
Nothing infectious. Altitude sickness above 3,000m, which the Jungfraujoch train reaches in two hours from 570m, and which catches people out. Ticks in summer woodland. And the sun at altitude, which burns through cloud.
The general rules — clinic timing, water, mosquitoes, insurance — are in travel health tips.
The guides in Switzerland
Interlaken & the Bernese OberlandSwitzerlandTwo lakes, three of the great north faces, and a railway that goes to 3,454 metres
ZermattSwitzerlandA car-free village under the most photographed mountain in the world, with skiing in every month
LucerneSwitzerlandA painted wooden bridge over a green river, a lake with steamers on it, and two mountains at the end of the line
GrindelwaldSwitzerlandA village under the north face of the Eiger, with a railway that climbs inside the mountain to the highest station in Europe
ZurichSwitzerlandA banking city with a swimmable river through the middle of it, and a lake that turns into a beach in July
St. MoritzSwitzerlandThe resort that invented winter tourism in 1864 on a bet, in a high dry valley where they race horses on the frozen lake and the sun shines about three hundred days a year
VerbierSwitzerlandA sunny terrace above the Rhône valley with the steepest lift-served terrain in Switzerland behind it, and the Freeride World Tour finishes here for a reason
Saas-FeeSwitzerlandA car-free village in a bowl with thirteen four-thousand-metre peaks standing round it and a glacier that skis all summer
DavosSwitzerlandThe highest town in Europe, built as a tuberculosis sanatorium in thin dry air, now five separate ski mountains and a conference nobody local enjoys