BALLENBERG

As the only open-air museum in Switzerland, the Ballenberg provides an insight into everyday rural life in Switzerland.Covering an area of 66 hectares, Ballenberg is the largest museum in Switzerland.Around 200,000 visitors come here during the season. Over 100 residential and farm buildings from all over Switzerland can be discovered and marveled at in the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum.The stately farmhouses, the modest buildings of the day laborers, the alpine settlements or the stables, barns, granaries, wash houses and drying ovens illustrate the everyday life and rural culture of past times as architectural and socio-historical witnesses.

The historic buildings could not be preserved in their original location and were therefore carefully dismantled and rebuilt on the 66-hectare museum site. Kitchens, chambers and living rooms provide an insight into everyday rural life in Switzerland.

However, the representatives of Switzerland’s various domestic landscapes form only one part of the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum.Farm gardens, fields, meadows and pastures laid out according to historical models surround the farm buildings.Craftsmen and women can be found in the buildings carrying out traditional work with old tools and equipment.

Taunerhaus

Until its relocation to the Ballenberg in 1965/66, the Taunerhaus from 1760 stood in the village of Detligen on the south-eastern edge of the municipality of Radelfingen, in what is now the Seeland administrative district of Bern. The house was once part of a Tauner settlement that had developed in the course of the early modern period a few hundred meters to the south-east outside the village center, in the vicinity of the local village smithy. The Tauner estates, with little or no land, were inhabited by the rural population with little or no privilege. As Tauner, they had to work on the estates of the farmers, who generally lived in the village themselves, or they earned their living in the rural trades.

Zopfhüsli

The Zopfhüsi and its inhabitants fit into the picture of a village society characterized by small farming conditions and a high proportion of day labourers and country craftsmen with no or very modest landholdings. The inhabitants of the house, most of whom were also owners of the Zopfhüsi, are known from written records. The sources also give us a very good insight into their social and economic circumstances; only the first owners are uncertain due to a lack of evidence.

Ballenberg