The city’s many festivals are treasured opportunities for the Genevans to stop being Swiss for a day. The Music Festival (www.fetedelamusique.ch) in June is by far the wildest, with hundreds of concerts all over town during two intense days. December’s L’Escalade is a veritable chocolate-stuffing contest, celebrating the failed invasion attempt by the Duke of Savoy in 1602. Chocolate and marzipan is ritually consumed from morning to midnight, with bonfires and huge historical parades thrown in. The Geneva Carnival, with street entertainers and costume parades, takes place in March every year (www.carnaval-geneve.ch), and from July to August you can enjoy open-air movie screenings at Cinélac on Port-Noir (www.cinelac.ch).

An astonishing 38 per cent of Geneva’s residents are foreigners, with many Americans in the mix. Thus the Independence Day celebrations in Geneva have, over the last 50 years, become the largest taking place outside of the United States (www.amclub.ch). Summer’s big event is the Geneva Festival (www.fetesdegeneve.ch), with an amusement park, concerts, fireworks, and food from every corner of the world. This is such a hyped event that the Genevans throw a pre-party, the Pré-Fêtes de Genève, at the end of July to get into the party spirit (same website). Proving that you can’t keep bureaucrats from interfering, the Geneva Marathon (www.genevemarathon.ch), revived in May 2006, is now under the bountiful patronage of the United Nations.

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