Living In Locarno - Our 2 Month Stay In Switzerland

We couldn’t resist to share our life living in Locarno experience with you after 2 beautiful summer months in this Swiss Southern location. With friendly locals, a pretty village, plenty of restaurants and the lake, Locarno has been a great place to live during the Summer.

Living In Locarno – The Best Things We’ve Enjoyed

So for our life in Locarno, it has been actually the first place we ever lived in Switzerland – and its been amazing! We moved to Switzerland in Summer 2022 and have enjoyed the season as much as possible.

Locarno was not actually our first choice of the place to relocate to in Ticino, with our actual choice of living location being Lugano. But we had the opportunity to stay in an Airbnb for 2 months within 5 minutes from the central area and 10 minutes from Lake Maggiore, so we went for it. This was perfect as it allowed us to move to the Ticino canton and then explore our next housing options from there.

Best Bits About Living In Locarno

So here we wanted to share our expat experience what it’s been like to live in Lugano for 2 months. Starting with our best bits about Locarno:

The mountain views
The local Italian food
That it takes only 30mins to go from Locarno to Cimetta mountain top!
The beautiful Lake Maggiore
The Summer Locarno Film Festival!
The easy paddle boat rental
A 20min bus ride to one of these gorgeous waterfalls
The pretty restaurants at the lake side
The too many Aperol Spritz we’ve enjoyed
The less-than 30 minute walk to Ascona

Learning points from our 2 months Living in Switzerland

So since Locarno was the first place we have ever lived while in Switzerland, it felt right to share some learnings that we experienced in the 2 months too.

They have local garbage bags that are coloured blue for general waste. You can buy these from the supermarkets.
Locarno might be a small location, but they hold many events during Summer! Our favourite from the 2 months was the Locarno Film Festival and the local risotto competition.
Getting registered with the Locarno city hall was a little difficult since we had only a 2 month contract with our airbnb. You should only register when it’s minimum 3 months onwards.
Locarno is the perfect location to explore other areas of Ticino, like these waterfalls. Moving to Locarno during the Summer was stunning!
Everyone was very friendly towards us, maybe since they thought we were tourists, but it went well practicing our Italian too.
Like anywhere in Switzerland, food can be expensive, but we spotted that supermarkets do some great deals so we learnt to shop around for items on discount rather than in 1 supermarket for all. We also signed up to their apps so that we get coupons and money off products each week.
Recycling is easy, with many locations for glass, plastic bottles and cardboard within walking distance from where we were.
There’s so much to do, see and eat, that we actually ran out of time in those 2 months. Since we were working full time from home, our afternoons and weekends were packed with explorations and summer events. But somehow we still didn’t manage to explore everything we wanted to. Luckily we now live in Lugano close by, so we can go back again for the things we haven’t seen or tried yet.
Everywhere does great food that is seasoned well, cooked as it should be and delicious. We did not come across a single place that was below standards.