Biodiversity at the Swiss Open-Air Museum Ballenberg

The Swiss Open-Air Museum Ballenberg is known for its buildings, cottage gardens and cultural landscapes. However, many people are unaware that the museum is home to a wide range of habitats, a great variety of species and numerous breeds of farm animals and varieties of cultivated plants, and that it has great potential to further promote biodiversity on its grounds.

In 2025, Ballenberg will make natural diversity even more visible and tangible. With the annual theme ‘Biodiversity – Ballenberg in Bloom!’, the museum invites visitors to discover biodiversity and its connections to the cultural landscape and architectural culture. It shows how nature and humans have been interacting for centuries and how cultivation can promote biodiversity. The Swiss Biodiversity Forum provides the museum with expert support.

A tour with specially marked stations shows, for example, how arable flora grows in harmony with cereals, how vineyards provide habitats for plants, reptiles and insects, or how ruderal vegetation can flourish near traditionally built houses. The Ballenberg's approaches to agriculture combine extensive management, regenerative methods and the promotion of biodiversity.

Each station invites visitors to become active themselves and to promote biodiversity within their own means. The Ballenberg season runs from 10 April to 2 November 2025.