Desalpage in St. Cergue - aka Swiss Cow Festival

"To the drone of alphorns, the crack of whips, the beat of folk music and the dexterity of flag throwers, herdsmen and about ten herds of cows return to the village for the winter from their summer in the alpine meadows."

This is straight out of the flyer for the 2011 Desalpe festival of St. Cergue (1 hour by train from Geneva). A friend of mine from work told me about this and I just could not wait to go see it. Every springs, Swiss farmers take their cows and other animals high up into the mountain pastures for the summer season. They (the cows) stay up there day and night away from the heat and bugs until the fall when it's time to bring them back down before the cold. The des-alpage is always a big, fun event, with big bells, alp horns, music, fondue and raclette. The Swiss know how to make normal life events fun!

Here is a link to a YouTube clip of an old festival I found online (I don't know how to post videos directly...) and then some of our own pictures...  Desalpe Festival

Different farms bringing their animals through the town... This is how close we were to the cows, and the cows look pretty angry... Who wouldn't be... Can you see this happening in the US? Not in a million years! Oh the risk of trampling and law suit... But this made it so much more fun!!

At times this can get pretty dangerous... look at this one... she got trampled by her buddies and was bleeding...

Here's a couple of the younger cow herds...

They also had some super cute Bernese mountain dogs (and others) pulling small carts with milk cans or kids sitting in them.And some donkey carts... Cute!

This will give you a rough idea of how many people were there... Crazy.

And also, here you see how the food/trinket stands line the big open grassy area? That's the route the cows would take, around the town, through the crowds.

And these are some of the yummy things that were being sold at the fair.

We also saw the Alp horn players mingling with the crowds. Can you imagine walking around with that huge instrument propped on our shoulder? Crazy. And here they are performing...

These are the bells that the cows wear. Wonder why the cows look like they are about to attack someone? Try prancing around with one of these on your neck... They are HEAVY! I lifted one of the smaller ones and it was ridiculously heavy, Can't even imagine how bad these must be. These came up to about my thigh.

Out in the open grassy area they had some cow and goat pens, and this guy was in one of them. I wouldn't really call this a petting zoo...Wouldn't want my kids trying to pet this beast...

And finally after all the walking and cow watching we decided to try some Raclette.  Everyone knows about Fondue. Well raclette is another Swiss cheesy specialty, equally as popular here, though not so much in the US. We blogged about this a while ago here...

Basically, half a wheel of tasty cheese is put under an electric warmer which melts the top layer that gets scraped onto a plate and served with bread or other stuff. Pretty tasty! If you think this was a meager portion, it was, but it tasted really good!

Overall it was a really neat experience. Definitely very authentic Swiss. It is something that Swss people have been doing for ages and is part of their history and everyday life. Cows go high up to the pastures in the spring, stay there all season to avoid the heat and bugs and are brought down at the end of the season when it gets cold... And the town celebrates harvest and a good year gone by. If you come visit us next year around the same time we will be happy to take you to a similar festival.