Pro Patria

Preserving and fostering cultural landscapes

This year's Pro Patria collection is designed to support the long-term conservation of historic and architecturally valuable buildings beside water throughout Switzerland. The campaign focuses on cultural monuments with a harmonious and often dynamic interplay with water - in other words, installations located on lakes, beside rivers, streams, ponds and other bodies of water. This combination of human endeavour and nature is well matched to Pro Patria's declared aim of preserving and fostering cultural landscapes in their entirety.

Restoring important buildings

The revenue from this nation-wide collection is to serve this objective by restoring important individual buildings, groups of buildings that represent a whole, as well as port installations with jetties and wharf facilities, quays with stairs and clumps of trees, swimming amenities, bathing houses and boathouses. What is more, the buildings beside water covered by this category include electricity, pumping and water works dating-from the 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course, mills and sawmills of all kinds, ranging from medieval to industrial times, occupy a central position in this context, making for an extraordinarily broad cultural sweep.

Stamps support Swiss architecture

The projects to be supported are selected in close co-operation with heritage conservation authorities throughout Switzerland, and a survey has already produced wide-ranging, high-profile and sometimes surprising suggestions. However the decisive criterion is the cultural history aspect, and hence the heritage conservation merits of each case.
The designed Pro Patria collection raises awareness throughout Switzerland of a conservation field which is not yet well known and has not received comprehensive coverage.
Date of issue: 25 May 2002

More information

Stamps Switzerland
Postage Stamps 2002
Pro Patria 2007
Swiss Air Rescue
Centenary of Swiss Railways
Expo.02
Escalade