2024 Annual Report of the Ballenberg Foundation – Swiss Open-Air Museum posts a positive result

Ballenberg Course Centre
2024 saw the successful integration of the Ballenberg Course Centre into the Ballenberg structure as a whole. In contrast to the Open-Air Museum, here we recorded a loss of CHF 1,410.22. However, after exploiting synergies with our human resources and in the development and marketing of services, the loss was significantly lower than in 2023 (CHF 61,497.44).

New offers, attractive themes
We focus heavily on how to attract more visitors to the Open-Air Museum and analyse tourists’ habits to this end. If you are only spending a short time in the Bernese Oberland, you are less likely to visit the Open-Air Museum. Likewise, many people who make their own travel plans have already planned out all their time in advance. The Ballenberg railway, which opened in April 2025, could help make even a short visit to the Open-Air Museum a more attractive option.

In the spring of 2024, we began relocating a new museum building. The Unterheid schoolhouse has become building number 1071 and is now adjacent to the Smallholder’s House with Pottery from Unterseen, Bern. It took around three months to dismantle and the project was supervised by the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern. In the meantime, we built solid foundations on the museum grounds, after which we were able to start work on the construction of the ground floor. The shell should be in place by the end of the 2025 season, and we will be setting up the display in 2026. The school building will provide an important platform for us to address the topic of education in the Open-Air Museum. It should be open to visitors from 2027.

New faces on the Board of Trustees
Following the resignations of Ivan Buck (Oberkirch) and Daniel Schild (Brienzwiler), the Board of Trustees welcomed two new members during its last meeting: Nicolas Ludin and Erich Sterchi.

Nicolas Ludin lives in Horw and has been heading Marketing/Sales in addition to being the Deputy Managing Director of the Zentralbahn railway for three and a half years. He first came to Ballenberg as a child during his family holidays in the Bernese Oberland. They made it a tradition to visit the Open-Air Museum every year – and Nicolas Ludin has many fond memories from back then. The business economist and certified hotelier is highly enthusiastic and motivated to bring his specialist knowledge of the hotel/catering industry and his marketing experience to the Ballenberg Board of Trustees so that it can benefit the museum. Thanks to his work with the Zentralbahn railway, the most important public-transport provider to the Open-Air Museum, we look forward to being able to ensure a connection to central Switzerland in the future as well.

Erich Sterchi from Hofstetten was elected to the Board of Trustees as the new regional representative for the municipalities of Brienz, Brienzwiler, Hofstetten, Oberried and Schwanden. This new provision replaces the previous seats on the Board of Trustees from the municipalities of Brienzwiler and Hofstetten and is now defined in the bylaws of the Board of Trustees. A trained surveyor and sports teacher, he knows Ballenberg inside out, having been on its Board of Trustees from 2016 to 2021. Erich Sterchi is passionately committed to the Open-Air Museum. As a regional representative, he looks forward to ensuring good communication and being the link between Ballenberg and the region.