Earth Pyramids of Ritten

On the Ritten plateau above Bolzano, slender columns of clay stand in steep wooded gullies, each one crowned by a single boulder balanced on its tip like a hat. These earth pyramids are counted among the most pronounced formations of their kind in Europe, and they cluster in several groups near the villages of Unterinn, Lengmoos and Oberbozen. The old local name for them, Lahntürme, means roughly landslide towers.

The material is moraine left behind by the Eisack valley glacier and its tributary glaciers at the end of the last ice age, about 25,000 years ago: fine clay packed with stones of every size. Dry, the clay sets almost as hard as rock; soaked by rain, it turns to mud and slides down the slope. Where a large stone sits in the moraine, it shields the clay beneath it, and as the ground around is washed away a column grows under the stone. The pillars reach around 10 to 15 m, and the higher the cap sits in the gully wall, the taller the column can become. The landscape is never finished: the columns keep eroding, and when one loses its cap and collapses, others are already taking shape around it. The colour changes from group to group — pale and whitish at Unterinn, pink to reddish at Lengmoos and Oberbozen.

The Ritten itself is a sunny plateau at 1,100 to 1,400 m on the north-eastern edge of Bolzano, with views across to the Dolomites. Since the 17th century Bolzano families have spent their summers up here to escape the heat of the valley, a custom known as Sommerfrische. Bolzano below is the capital of South Tyrol, a German- and Italian-speaking city at the meeting of the Eisack and Adige valleys.

Getting there

Bolzano is about 12 km away. A cable car of roughly 4 km climbs from the city to Oberbozen in about 12 minutes, and the Oberbozen group of pyramids lies close to its upper station. From Oberbozen the Rittner Bahn, a narrow-gauge line opened in 1907, runs across the plateau to Klobenstein, from where a marked footpath leads to the pyramids at Lengmoos. Bolzano Airport (BZO) is about 15 km away.