Rütli Meadow

About this place

The Rütli is a small sloping meadow overlooking the Lake Uri arm of Lake Lucerne, and there is almost nothing built on it: grass, trees, a farmhouse working as a restaurant, and a flagpole. Yet it is **the most important symbolic site in all of Switzerland** — the place where, in the national story, representatives of the three original cantons swore an alliance against Habsburg rule. Honesty matters here: **the oath is a story, not a document.** The oldest written text of the confederation is the 1291 charter kept in Schwyz; the Rütli oath scene was first written down in the White Book of Sarnen around 1470, given its canonical form by the chronicler Aegidius Tschudi in the 1570s, and then shaped by the German poet **Friedrich Schiller** in his play *Wilhelm Tell* of 1804, which fixed it in the Swiss imagination in the form everyone knows. A Swiss charitable society bought the meadow in 1859 with a national subscription to save it from development; it is now inalienable public property, and the official National Day ceremony is held here every **1 August**. There is no road: you arrive by boat — the shortest crossing is from **Brunnen** — and climb seven to ten minutes from the landing stage, or walk down to it from the village of **Seelisberg**. The Swiss Path also starts here, a walking route around the Lake Uri arm created in 1991 for the confederation's seven-hundredth anniversary.