Switzerland’s Once-in-a-Generation, Over-the-Top Party

The Swiss aren’t known for dancing all night to ABBA, but in the town of Vevey, the 52 Places Traveler found, every 20 years or so they let loose.

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July 30, 2019

Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before Vevey, he was one of only four tourists in the Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas.

I arrived in Vevey, a small town that hugs the northeastern coast of Lake Geneva, so jet-lagged that I thought I might be hallucinating. I saw a human-sized starling posted up on a bar stool drinking a beer. A cow wearing a crown of flowers that would rival Carmen Miranda’s most flamboyant headpiece lumbered in my direction. Screaming at the top of their lungs, a gaggle of children dressed in the overalls of 18th-century farmhands, ran in circles.

Vevey’s Fête des Vignerons, or winegrowers’ festival, is a big deal, though most of the people under 30 that I spoke to in the days leading up to my arrival — including those from the German-speaking region on the other side of Switzerland — had no idea it existed. That could be because the last time it happened, we were 10 years old.