Rabat – For years, Jonas Lauwiner was just a young man of Moroccan origins, raised in Interlaken, quietly flipping through Swiss land registry records while the rest of the country went about its business.
By the time Switzerland noticed, he had already won.
Lauwiner was 20 years old when his father gave him his first piece of land, a small agricultural plot bought cheaply years earlier.
For most people, it would have been a nice gift and nothing more. For Lauwiner, it was a starting point.
“Since I was eight years old, I always wanted my own land. My dream finally was fulfilled,” he told France 24.
Then he looked next door. The adjacent plot had no registered owner.
And under Article 658 of the Swiss Civil Code, that meant anyone could legally and officially claim it for a few hundred francs in paperwork fees.
So he did. Then he started wondering whether there were more.
“Then I thought, this cannot be the only one: it would be too lucky if I just discovered the only plot in Switzerland. So, I started a big search, and I discovered another one, and another one, and another one,” he said.
The search went on for years. Nobody stopped him, because nobody knew how.
An empire in plain sight
By the time Lauwiner was done, he had registered around 150 plots across Switzerland, more than 117,000 square meters of territory that had simply been sitting there, unclaimed, in the country’s own records.
Among his acquisitions: fields, open land, and 83 roads actively used by the Swiss public every single day.
“Over 5,000 people per day drive over my roads to their homes,” he noted.
It was all perfectly legal. Not a single law was broken. A rule had existed for years, buried in the civil code, and one man had simply bothered to use it.
A crown to complete the picture
In 2019, Lauwiner, by then a resident of Burgdorf working full-time at a pharmaceutical company, decided his land empire needed a formal declaration.
He organized a coronation at Bern’s Nydegg Church, showed up in full royal regalia including an 18-carat gold jeweled crown, and declared himself King Jonas I, symbolic monarch of Switzerland.
He knew it would raise eyebrows.
“The role of king is very special in Switzerland because it’s not really accepted. It’s very controversial,” he highlighted.
But he was unbothered. “I don’t have too many haters. Nobody has stopped me, that’s for sure, because it’s not possible.”
Switzerland has no royal family, no monarchy in its constitution, and no historical tradition of a king. Lauwiner does not see that as a problem.
“I’m not a constitutional monarch,” he said. “I’m a symbolic monarch. There is a king in Switzerland, and it’s me, King Jonas.”
When the joke stopped being funny
For a while, many dismissed him as an eccentric or a prankster. Then the bills started arriving.
Municipalities across Switzerland began discovering that roads their residents had used for decades were now, technically, the property of King Jonas.
In the village of Geuensee, local authorities tried to reclaim one such street. Lauwiner’s offer: 150,000 francs, or rename it “Chemin Lauwiner.”
They declined and filed a criminal complaint for abusive exploitation instead.
Local lawyer Loris Fabrizio Mainardi, who brought the complaint, told RTS, “Mr. Lauwiner’s operetta-style drama doesn’t interest me as such. What drives me crazy is that he’s trying to pressure people who are in a vulnerable situation by imposing his own price demands on them.”
In Hochdorf, local MP Josef Schuler was equally blunt, stating, “He is asking for money for something that doesn’t require a significant investment. I think he’s kind of playing with us a bit.”
Lauwiner sees it differently. “The only thing that I charge is a fee for maintenance, I don’t make profit with these roads,” he emphasized.
“Sometimes I sell a road, and that’s how I make profit. It’s not easy to maintain 149 plots of land.”
The door is closing, but he’s already through it
Swiss cantons are now moving to change the law, giving municipalities first refusal on unclaimed land to prevent anyone from repeating Lauwiner’s maneuver.
He finds the urgency amusing. The most valuable ownerless plots were always rare, he says, and he has already taken them.
The law is being rewritten to close a loophole that has already been fully exploited.
As for the politicians and officials now scrambling to respond, he said that he understands exactly what is really driving them.
“They are just jealous that they did not have the idea,” he said.
The king who wants more
Lauwiner is not retreating. In 2024, he ran for Burgdorf’s city council under the name King Jonas Lauwiner, won nearly 700 votes as an independent, and took a seat. Now he is eyeing national politics.
“I’m trying for the national council. I’m trying for the State Council. I’ll try for everything,” he mentioned.
And yet, beneath the crown and the controversy, his stated vision for the future is surprisingly low-key.
“In the end, I really want to be at peace, on a beach somewhere, enjoying my life.”
