Swiss Boarding Schools Holiday Camps in Disentis and Zurich

Swiss Boarding Schools Disentis and Zurich run short international holiday camps for teenagers on the two campuses of their boarding school group: a Mountain Campus in Disentis, high in the Grisons Alps, and a City Campus in the Winterthur and Zurich area. The summer camp splits a twelve-day stay between the two, so students get alpine nature in the first half and Swiss city life in the second. The winter camp keeps the group in Disentis and is built around the snow. Mornings are language classes. Students choose German or English and study in small groups, with forty lessons across the summer stay and twenty-five across the winter one, finishing with a language skills certificate. The teaching is deliberately practical: the language carries on into the afternoon programme, where students use it with peers from other countries rather than putting it away with their books. Summer afternoons in the mountains bring hiking, mountain biking and climbing in the Grisons Alps. After the transfer to the City Campus the programme shifts to football, padel tennis, softball and indoor sport, walks through picturesque old towns and villages, a visit to the Rhine Falls, Europe’s largest waterfalls, and science outside the classroom at the Technorama museum and the ETH campus, with a look at how Swiss chocolate is made. Winter afternoons are given to skiing, snowboarding, sledding and cross-country skiing, with indoor sport and cultural activities when the group comes off the slopes. Evenings on both camps are quieter: film nights, board and card games, time with the group. Participants live in the boarding houses of the school on campus, with staff supervision around the clock including at night, and all meals taken on campus. The daily rhythm is the one the school uses in term time — breakfast, classes, lunch, activities, supervised study, dinner, evening programme, bedtime — which is part of why the camp works as a first taste of Swiss boarding school life. Fees are all-inclusive and cover tuition, the activity programme, pastoral care, learning material, room and board and the certificate. The winter camp includes group transfers from and back to Zurich Airport; on the summer camp the transfer between the two campuses is part of the programme and an airport transfer on arrival day can be pre-booked separately. Places are limited and capped per nationality, so the group stays genuinely mixed and registrations are taken in the order they arrive. The camps suit teenagers in the middle school and early high school years who want a short, structured stay abroad: language study that is taken seriously, a full afternoon programme, and a Swiss setting that changes halfway through the summer camp. Because the format is a single fixed intake per season rather than a rolling weekly one, families planning around it should confirm the current season’s dates and availability with the provider before booking flights.