Urn and columbarium in Switzerland: where the ashes rest, and what the law allows

A standard urn holds around three to four litres, which is what an adult's ashes come to. There are smaller models too, keepsake urns, for when several relatives each want to keep a small quantity of ashes.

The material matters more than the look, because it decides what you can do afterwards. Ceramic, metal, glass and stone urns last indefinitely and suit a columbarium or a shelf at home. Biodegradable urns, made of pressed wood, sand, salt, card or plant fibre, go into the ground and break down in about a year. Many cemeteries insist on one for an urn buried directly in the earth.

Two practical points. Check the maximum dimensions your municipality allows before you buy: burial niches are built to precise measurements, and an urn that does not fit has to be replaced. And nothing obliges you to buy the urn from the funeral home, even though that is the simplest route.

A columbarium is a set of burial niches, usually in a wall or a small building inside the cemetery, where the urns are placed. Each niche carries a plaque with the name and the dates, sometimes a photograph. Depending on its size it holds one urn or several.

What you are buying is a grave concession (the right to use a plot for a set number of years) granted by the municipality, normally for twenty years, renewable on payment of a fee. For people domiciled in the municipality, the first period is often free or close to it, as it is for graves. The rates and the durations are set by the municipal cemetery regulations, and they vary a great deal from one municipality to the next.

The part nobody thinks about when choosing: the day the concession expires. Twenty years on, someone will have to decide whether to renew, and pay. Write the date down and tell the next generation. Otherwise the municipality ends up posting a letter to an address where nobody lives.

Almost every cemetery in Switzerland offers two further options, and they answer opposite needs. For the stone and the lettering on an urn grave, our gravestone page covers the materials, the prices and the permissions.

Swiss law is much more permissive here than the law of the neighbouring countries. No federal law requires ashes to be placed in a cemetery. They are handed to the family, who can scatter them in the mountains, in a forest, on an alpine pasture, in a lake or a river, or bury them in their own garden.

That freedom still has limits. The rules to respect:

• Land always has an owner. On private land you need the owner's agreement. The same holds in forests: Swiss forests belong to tens of thousands of private owners, to municipalities or to citizens' corporations (Bürgergemeinde / bourgeoisie), even though the public may walk in them.
• Telling the municipality is advisable, above all when an urn is buried outside a cemetery. Some municipalities and some cantons have rules of their own.
• Do not disturb anyone. Pick a discreet place and a discreet moment, and make sure the wind carries the ashes away from walkers.
• Protected areas are excluded, along with drinking-water catchments and nature reserves. Forestry law and water-protection law apply.
• If you bury a biodegradable urn, dig deep enough: it disappears in about a year, and ground movement can bring it back up.
• The ashes can be divided between several places or several relatives. Nothing prohibits it.

One distinction explains a good deal of the confusion. Several German-speaking cantons regulate the commercial business of scattering ashes and placing urns outside a cemetery, while scattering done by the family itself stays free. If you go through a company, for a scattering in the mountains or from a helicopter, ask it to confirm in writing that it is in order in the canton concerned.

It is allowed, and there is no permit to apply for. You can keep the urn at home for as long as you want, and bury it in your garden if you own the land.

Three things are worth thinking through before you take that route. Moving house, first: the urn moves with you, and that unsettles people more than they expect. The estate: if the house is sold one day with an urn buried in the garden, the question has to be settled then, and the buyers should not be the ones who discover it. And the family around you: relatives do not always agree, and an urn at one child's home leaves the others with no shared place to go.

Many families find a balance by keeping a small keepsake urn at home and placing the rest of the ashes somewhere everyone can reach.

Alongside the traditional resting places, other forms of remembrance have grown up over the past few years. Nothing stops you combining them.

The funeral home always keeps a selection, and that is the simplest route: it takes care of whether the urn fits the cemetery. You can also buy elsewhere, from a craftsperson, a ceramicist, a glassblower or a woodturner, or online, as long as you check the permitted dimensions and the delivery time, which has to hold before the service. The exact measurements of a niche come from the municipality.