Best Summer Camps in Switzerland

Because we don’t run a traditional summer camp — and that’s exactly the point.

At most camps, children are transported from activity to activity, handed equipment, told what to do, and collected at the end of the day. It’s fun, but passive. Young Explorers Club is built around a completely different philosophy: children are active participants in everything, not passengers.

When we go mountain biking, kids don’t just follow a guide down a prepared trail. They help plan the route, they navigate, they push through the hard climbs, they fix a puncture on the side of a mountain road. When we do a survival camp, they actually build a shelter, start a fire, and cook their own food in the wild — not as a demonstration, but as a real experience where the outcome depends on them. When we run team challenge days, the groups are deliberately mixed across nationalities and languages, so a 12-year-old from Brazil has to communicate, negotiate, and lead alongside a kid from Switzerland and another from Japan — with no parents and no screens to fall back on.

This is not accidental. It is the core of what we do. Every activity is designed so that children are socially and physically challenged at the same time.

They cannot just stand at the back. They cannot stay in their comfort zone. They cannot spend the day on their phone. The structure of the camp makes growth unavoidable — and the joy that comes from genuinely earning something, from reaching the top of a via ferrata with a group of new friends, from cooking a meal on an open fire after a 30km bike day, is the kind of joy that doesn’t fade when summer ends.

The results are visible and lasting: kids who arrived shy and anxious leave with real confidence. Kids who had never spoken English or French outside a classroom come home fluent enough to make friends for life. Teenagers who had never been responsible for anything return with a sense of autonomy that surprises their own parents.

That is why families from over 30 countries choose Young Explorers Club, and why so many come back year after year. There are many good summer camps in Switzerland. Very few ask children to truly rise to the occasion — and give them the tools, the environment, and the freedom to do it.