Wettingen turnip lantern parade: the calendar's only route through a monastery park
✓ Checked at the source · as of 21 October 2026
Most turnip lantern parades run along neighbourhood streets — past front gardens, streetlights and parked cars. Wettingen goes through a monastery park: old walls, no street lighting, and the turnips as the only source of light.
📅 Parade 2026 — when and where
A single Saturday – miss it and you wait a year.
Räbeliechtli-Umzug Wettingen
✓Saturday, 7 November 2026 · 1 day · 17:30
- Organiser
- Familienstern Wettingen
Source: familienstern-wettingen.ch · checked on 21 October 2026
Each bar is a documented evening. Dark = this parade, light = the nearest ones. A parade lasts an hour and often falls on the same evening as another — read only a date and you miss that the next village sets off at the same minute.
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🚋 Meeting point & transport
- Meeting point
- Kiesplatz vor der Klosterkirche
- Destination
- Klosterpark Wettingen
📋 Good to know before you go
- Food and drink
- Brötli und Tee zum Abschluss
✨ Highlights on site
What sets this parade apart from every other one is not in its date.
A turnip lantern parade lives on the contrast between the light inside the turnip and the darkness around it. On a neighbourhood street that contest is won by the streetlight — it is brighter, it is everywhere, and the turnip becomes decoration. Wettingen sidesteps the problem by taking the parade somewhere with no street lighting at all.
Wettingen monastery is a former Cistercian abbey, dissolved by the Aargau cantonal parliament in 1841; since 1976 its buildings have housed the Kantonsschule Wettingen. In this calendar it is the only parade whose route runs through such a site — none of the other 23 places in the calendar mentions a monastery.
The second difference is smaller and still noticeable: the singing happens on the move, not before setting off. Elsewhere people warm up at the meeting point and then walk in silence. Singing while walking makes for a different evening — the parade is heard before it is seen, and children keep the pace better when there is a song.
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🗺️ Nearby parades
Nationwide: 23 entries with 19 documented dates. In the canton of Aargau, the ConvivaPlus calendar lists 3 parades — considerably fewer than in the canton of Zurich, but with a character of their own: here family centres and parents' associations carry the events, not neighbourhood associations.
7 November 2026 is one of the densest evenings of the season: besides Wettingen, 5 further parades in the calendar set off. The densest evening of all is 7 November 2026 with 6 simultaneous parades — a figure from the ConvivaPlus analysis that exists only because every date was read at a first-hand source (organiser or municipality).
More turnip lantern parades in the canton of Aargau
All of the canton of Aargau →Just across the canton border
❓ FAQ — answered
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The ConvivaPlus verdict
For families with small children it is also the most practical parade of the evening: the 17:30 start comes half an hour before the three Zurich parades that same evening, and you are back correspondingly earlier. If you want the late, fully dark departure, Oberstrass is the better fit.
When we last checked: Time, meeting point, route and refreshments come from Familienstern Wettingen (as of 10 September 2026). Nothing is published about weather, costs or where to get turnips; nor how long the walk through the park takes.
Check the latest: ConvivaPlus Turnip Lantern Dataset 2026 – Wettingen →
- ◆Singing on the move is not the same as singing beforehand. Three parades in this calendar mention singing. Two of them sing at the meeting point before setting off — an opening ritual. Wettingen sings while walking, and that changes the procession: it has a beat, stragglers find their way back, and the route feels shorter than it is.
- ◆It only starts at 17:30 – an evening outing.
How we check
According to the ConvivaPlus calendar, 9 of the 19 confirmed events this season start earlier than this one and 4 later.
Every date comes from the organiser's, the municipality's or the canton's own site — never from an aggregator, never copied over from last year. Next to each source is the date we last read it.
Something missing or changed? A note below is enough; we check it at the source.
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Wettingen is the only parade in the calendar that crosses a monastery site — and the only one where the singing happens along the way rather than before setting off.
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🏮 Turnip lantern parade · 10 September 2026