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I didn't plan to learn Cumbia in Switzerland. I planned to hike. I had boots, a backpack, and exactly zero interest in dance classes. But Interlaken has this way of ambushing you — the lake reflects the mountains so perfectly it looks fake, the air smells like pine and possibility, and somewhere between the yodeling tours and the paragliding stalls, a sound caught me. Something with drums that wouldn't leave my head. I followed it to a studio above a chocolate shop and spent the next two weeks learning a dance I'd only ever seen in videos from Bogotá.
If that sounds improbable, welcome to Interlaken. The town is best known for adrenaline and alpine scenery, but beneath the surface — in basements, community halls, and the occasional open-air terrace — there's a Cumbia scene that would surprise anyone who thinks of Switzerland as culturally sealed. Travelers bring it. Expats keep it alive. And once you feel the basic step, you start noticing it everywhere: in the rhythm of the trains, in the sway of people at lakeside bars, in the way the locals nod when a particular track comes on.
So here's what I learned — not as a trainer, but as someone who showed up with two left feet and a stubborn refusal to be bad at something I loved watching.
The Step That Changes Everything
The Cumbia basic step is deceptively simple. You step forward on one foot, bring the other to meet it, then step back. Repeat. That's it. But the moment you add the hip — just a slight lateral sway as your feet come together — the whole thing transforms. What felt mechanical suddenly has a pulse.
My instructor, a woman from Medellín who'd been in Switzerland for six years, put it plainly: "The step is just walking. The hips are the conversation." She wasn't wrong. I could replicate the footwork after five minutes. The hips took me three days to stop overthinking. The key, I found, wasn't to move my hips deliberately — it was to stop resisting them. The rhythm does the work if you let it. Your body wants to move that way. It already knows how. You just have to stop apologising for it.
As for arm placement, there's a natural tendency to stiffen up. Don't. Your arms follow your hips. If your upper body looks like it's standing guard while your feet do all the talking, the dance looks broken. Keep everything loose. Breathe. The whole body is the instrument.
The Turn That Makes You Feel Like You Know What You're Doing
Every dancer hits the same wall: you're moving fine in a straight line, and then the floor curves or you need to swap direction, and suddenly you look like someone who's lost their keys.
The Cumbia turn solves this, and it's the move that made me feel like I was actually dancing rather than executing choreography. You pivot on your standing foot as your other foot meets it, rotating your body 180 degrees, then continue the pattern. You turn back on the next repetition. What this does — practically, not just aesthetically — is keep you mobile. You can read a partner's lead, dodge someone who's drifted into your path, or simply change your orientation without breaking rhythm.
The trickiest part for beginners isn't the mechanics. It's the dizziness. Your brain wants to track your rotation against fixed points in the room, which makes you slow down and wobble. The fix is to fix your gaze on a single point for the duration of the turn and only redirect after you've completed it. Sounds obvious. Try remembering it when your body is spinning and the drums are fast.
Partner Work: Where Cumbia Actually Lives
Here's the thing nobody tells you about Cumbia: you can practice alone forever and still feel lost the first time you dance with a partner. The solo steps are the grammar. Partner work is the conversation.
The classic Cumbia hold — hands at chest level, your right hand in your partner's left, your left hand resting on their shoulder or upper arm — looks formal from the outside. It feels completely different when you're in it. There's a constant subtle conversation happening through your palms and fingertips. The lead communicates direction and tempo through pressure, not pushes. The follow reads that pressure and translates it into movement. It sounds technical, but in practice it's more like a really good argument where nobody's trying to win.
One evening in the studio, my instructor paired me with a retired Swiss banker who'd been dancing Cumbia for twelve years. He led me through a basic sequence without saying a word — just pressure, timing, and a slight shift of his shoulder. I went exactly where I needed to go. The first time it works, that moment of mutual understanding without speech, it's quietly one of the best feelings I've had on a dance floor.
The Move That Separates Beginners from Everyone Else
The Cumbia cross is the thing that will make people in the room notice you. It looks advanced because it has an element of surprise — your left foot crosses in front of your right as you bring your feet together, then you step back and recover. The motion is slightly diagonal, slightly unexpected, and when it flows into the basic step afterward, it creates a rhythm that feels more layered, more alive.
I spent a week being terrible at this. My feet wanted to cross over each other in a way that made me stumble. My instructor had to physically adjust my weight distribution more than once. But when it finally clicked — when the cross and the step started speaking the same language — I felt something unlock. The dance stopped feeling like a sequence of moves and started feeling like a sentence.
Finding Your People in Interlaken
I won't pretend Interlaken is a Cumbia capital. It's not. But that almost makes it better. The community that exists there is made of people who genuinely love it, not people who are going through the motions. Studios host regular evenings. Someone always brings the right speakers. You dance with strangers and leave feeling like you know them.
The best thing you can do is show up consistently and be willing to look foolish. Nobody in those rooms cares if you're new. Everyone there was new once. The culture of Cumbia — its Colombian roots, its tradition of communal celebration — survives even in the Swiss mountains, carried by people who refuse to let it stay far from home.
What the Mountains Taught Me About This Dance
Two weeks in Interlaken changed how I think about learning. I'd assumed Cumbia required a specific kind of person — someone with rhythm, someone with confidence, someone who grew up dancing. What I found instead was that Cumbia asks for one thing above all: willingness to feel ridiculous while your body figures out what it already knows.
The mountains around Interlaken are ancient and immovable. Cumbia is the opposite — fluid, responsive, alive to the moment. I found something unexpected in the contrast. A dance from the Colombian lowlands, with its drums and its heat and its history of celebration, fitting perfectly into a town of cable cars and glacial lakes. That sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. It's just what happened.
I still think about that first night, following strange drums to a studio above a chocolate shop. I walked in hesitant. I left with something I can't fully describe except to say that my body felt different — looser, more honest, more present. That's what Cumbia did for me. That's what it might do for you, if you let it catch you too.
