La Garenne Summer Camp — Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland

La Garenne Summer Camp is the summer programme of La Garenne International School, a boarding school on its own campus in Chesières, just above the resort of Villars-sur-Ollon in the Vaud Alps. The camp takes children and teenagers aged 6 to 16 and runs them through a fixed daily rhythm: language classes in the morning, activities in the afternoon, supervised social time in the evening. The teaching is done in English or French, on weekday mornings, in groups that the school describes as open to every level from complete beginner to advanced. Books and school materials are covered by the camp fee. For parents, that morning block is what separates this kind of camp from a straightforward activity holiday — the child comes home with something more than photographs, without the summer turning into school. Afternoons look different depending on age. The camp splits campers into three bands — six to nine, ten to twelve, and thirteen to sixteen — and each band gets its own programme rather than a shared one. Younger campers walk in the mountains, take to Lake Geneva for water activities, and rotate through sport, arts and creative sessions. Teenagers get the adrenaline version: canyoning, bridge jumping, mountain karting and expeditions further into the Alps, along with workshops alongside their classes. Both boarding and day places are offered. Boarders live in the school's own chalets on campus, in rooms shared by four to five campers, with part of the accommodation en suite and resident staff in the houses. Personal laundry is covered. Day campers stay locally with their families and join the same weekday programme, arriving early in the morning and leaving in the evening. Meals and snacks are prepared on campus for both groups, and the kitchen accommodates most dietary requirements when families give notice. The camp is sold in fortnights, with two consecutive fortnights available as a single four-week stay. Fees are quoted separately for the younger and older age bands, and separately again for boarders and day campers. What the fee covers is unusually broad: tuition, meals, accommodation for boarders, the activity and excursion programme, camp uniform, books and materials, wi-fi, local taxes and return transfers from Geneva Airport on the official travel dates. Outside the fee sit optional activities, compulsory Swiss health insurance charged per day, personal spending money and travel to Switzerland. The optional programme is worth reading before booking, because it carries some of the camp's most distinctive offerings — a football block coached by Juventus Vaud staff, horse riding, a robotics workshop, lake sports, paragliding, a parachute jump for older teenagers, track karting with a Swiss champion driver, and multi-day excursions to Europa Park and Chamonix. Some of these are tied to specific sessions. Supervision is presented as round-the-clock, with older teenagers allowed into the village unaccompanied only on written parental permission. The school reports over forty-five nationalities across a season, so the group a child joins is genuinely international rather than dominated by one market. The setting itself — a mountain resort at roughly 1,300 metres, with lake and glacier country within reach — is much of the point.