New Castle (Bümpliz)

The New Bümpliz Castle is a castle in Bümpliz, a suburb of Bern, Switzerland.

It was built in 1742 next to the now so-called Old Bümpliz Castle for Daniel Tschiffely. After his death, both castles went to his son-in-law Karl Stürler, and when he died in Venlo, Netherlands, in 1777, they were sold to Abraham Samuel Lombach.

However, he also passed away just one year later, and the castles came into the possession of Johann Rudolf von Graffenried in 1783 through his wife's second marriage. After the fall of Old Bern, he sold the New Castle in 1799 to the businessman and court bailiff Gottlieb Haag, who later also acquired the Old Castle. In 1825, Ludwig Friedrich von Steiger bought both castles, in 1837 Franz Karl von Tavel, and in 1839 Johann Friedrich Albrecht Tribolet, who established an institution for the mentally ill there.

In 1848, Jakob Allemann, a student of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, took over the institution and, together with his brother Benedikt, established the Institut des Frères Alleman, a boys' reformatory that existed until 1882 and earned the entire village the Bernese German nickname Löffuschlyffi (spoon grinding shop).

After the Old Castle had already been converted into a non-profit community center in 1919 and bought by the city of Bern in 1954, the New Castle also passed to the city in 1977 after several changes of ownership.

From February 1, 2005, the New Castle was the seat of the Civil Registry Office of the Bern district. Less than five years later – on January 1, 2010 – the canton carried out a district reform, replacing the Bern district with the Bern-Mittelland administrative district. This merged the previous 23 civil registry offices into 7 new ones, and the castle no longer had the capacity to accommodate the expanded office, which subsequently returned to the center of Bern. However, the New Bümpliz Castle continues to be used as a so-called special external ceremonial venue.