The Ruggeller Riet, the country's most studied fen

Liechtenstein’s lowest point isn’t a valley or a lake, it’s a fen. The Ruggeller Riet fills the country’s northern tip, between the village of Ruggell and the Austrian border, and it’s the most unusual landscape you’ll see anywhere in the principality, flat, damp and teeming with life. To me it’s the best reason to head up to the Unterland in spring.

What the Riet is

Riet comes from Old High German and means marshy ground grown with reeds. The Ruggeller Riet is a low-lying fen of 90.86 hectares at 430 metres, shared between Ruggell and Schellenberg. A third of the land belongs to the state, and the rest to Ruggell municipality, a farming cooperative from Altenstadt in Vorarlberg and private owners. Back in the village, the Küefer-Martis-Huus in Ruggell holds a museum devoted mainly to water, which pairs well with the fen.

Its story begins when the Rhine glacier melted around 16,500 years ago. Still water was left between the Rhine and the Ill, gradually silting up, and over some 10,000 years a layer of peat almost nine metres thick built up on top, which the Historisches Lexikon rates as the thickest anywhere in Vorarlberg or Liechtenstein.

When should you visit the Ruggeller Riet?

In May. The municipality says so itself, recommending a walk or ride through the Riet that month, when the irises flower. Outside May you get a quiet landscape of peat meadows, ditches and scrub, pretty but less striking. If you like birdwatching there’s something in every season, and in winter the Gampriner Seelein, over in Gamprin, welcomes great egrets, as I explain on the lakes of Liechtenstein.

As it’s a reserve and the ground is peat, I’d always stay on the paths. The Lexikon itself lists leisure activities among the threats to the reserve, alongside farm fertiliser and drying out.

Offerings, coins and peat

The Riet holds thousands of years of history underfoot. Pollen cores taken in 1990 contain cereal from the start of the fourth millennium BC, proof that people in the Rhine valley were already farming in the Neolithic. When peat was cut in the 19th and 20th centuries, ornaments and weapons from the Bronze and Iron Ages kept turning up, usually about two metres down, probably sunk as offerings. Around 1883 a hoard of 25 Roman coins hidden in the 4th century came to light. The first pieces ended up in the museum in Bregenz, as Liechtenstein had nowhere to keep them yet.

For centuries it was common land for Ruggell and Schellenberg, whose villagers grazed it and mowed it for litter in late autumn, until the two divided it in 1794 with a ditch. Between 1831 and 1843 Ruggell’s 88 households were each given four plots, and those strips can still be picked out 73 times on the ground. Peat was cut for fuel because firewood was scarce. In 1947 there were 101 huts for drying it and by 2019 eight remained. The last cutting took place in 1992.

The airport that never was

What surprised me most is that in 1964-65 there was serious talk of building an international airport for Vorarlberg here, with its terminal buildings on Liechtenstein soil. There were also plans for a radio station and a mud spa. None of them happened, and things went the other way.

In 1970 a regional botanical and zoological society was founded right here in the open air, and it commissioned the first vegetation map. In 1976 WWF recognised the site’s international importance, on 17 October 1978 the government declared it a reserve, and in 1991 it joined the list of Ramsar wetlands. Across the border, Vorarlberg had protected the Bangser Riet in 1974, so between the two countries about 155 hectares are safeguarded.

The best-studied patch of the country

By 1990, 1,631 animal species and 448 vascular plant species had been recorded here, and the Lexikon calls it the best-studied area in Liechtenstein. The protection campaign’s figurehead was the curlew, which hasn’t bred here since 1991. Its successor is a butterfly endangered across Europe, the false ringlet.

Not all the news is good. Measurements in 2019 found nitrogen inputs four times above critical levels, mainly from farming, and the Riet is slowly drying out. In 1982 a pond was dug to replace the pools lost when peat cutting ended. How the Liechtenstein Trail crosses it is set out on stage 5 of the Liechtenstein Trail.