Many Spaniards who have lived in Switzerland for years discover it by chance: the reinforced metal door in the basement, the room with thick walls and special ventilation that nobody uses for anything. It is the "abri de protection civile", the atomic refuge. And it's not a rarity: Switzerland has shelter capacity for more than nine million people, practically its entire population. It's the only country in the world with that coverage.
Since the 1960s, the Federal Law on the Protection of the Population and Civil Protection (LPPCi) has required all new construction of a certain size to include an approved shelter. The State can dispense with the obligation to build its own if the area already has sufficient capacity in collective facilities, but the logic is always the same: each inhabitant must have an assigned place. The communes are responsible for that.
The interior of these shelters has a very functional appearance: steel doors several centimeters thick, ventilation filters against chemical or radioactive agents, water reserves, basic communication equipment. In theory, they are designed to withstand a blast wave and keep people alive for days without access to the outside. In practice, in peacetime they are storage rooms or building files, which is what most owners do with them.
This comes from the Cold War, and Switzerland never dismantled it. While other European countries liquidated their civil protection plans in the 1990s, Switzerland maintained them. With the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions since 2022, the country revised and updated usage plans. If one day you receive a circular from your municipality about "civil protection" or you are assigned a place number in a shelter, you know exactly what it is.