Lago di Braies

The lake sits at 1,496 metres in a side valley of the Puster Valley, and it exists because a mountain once fell. A landslide from the Herrstein slid across the course of the Prags stream and dammed it; behind that natural wall collected a sheet of water about 1.2 kilometres long and 300 to 400 metres wide, reaching 36 metres at its deepest. The colour is the reason people come: in the shallows the water is clear emerald, deepening to blue further out, and it stays cold, rarely warmer than about 14°C even at the height of summer. At the southern end the grey wall of the Seekofel (Croda del Becco, 2,810 m) rises almost straight out of the water, so that on still mornings the peak hangs upside down in the lake.

The best way to see it is on foot. A loop of a little over three kilometres follows the whole shore: the western side is broad and level, the eastern side narrow, rocky and stepped, with the view shifting at every bend between the open water, the forested slopes and the rock walls above. The lake lies inside the Fanes-Sennes-Prags Nature Park, and it is also the traditional starting point of the Alta Via 1, the long high route that crosses the Dolomites southward to Belluno. In winter the surface freezes hard enough for curling matches, held here since 2012, and the whole basin turns white and silent.

The hotel on the northern shore carries a quieter history. In the last days of April 1945 the SS moved a group of 139 prominent prisoners of the Nazi regime, among them aristocrats, politicians and clergy from seventeen countries, from Dachau to the Puster Valley, apparently to be held as hostages. On 30 April a Wehrmacht officer forced their guards to stand down, the prisoners were brought to the Hotel Pragser Wildsee, and American troops reached them there on 4 May. An archive at the hotel keeps that episode documented, and relatives of the German resistance still gather there each July. More recently the lake became familiar to Italian television audiences as a setting of the series Un passo dal cielo.

Getting there

The lake is in the municipality of Prags (Braies) in South Tyrol, about 33 km from Bressanone (Brixen). The nearest airport is Bolzano (BZO), roughly 64 km away. Bus line 442 runs up the Prags valley to the lake from the railway stations of Niederdorf (Villabassa) and Toblach (Dobbiaco) in the Puster Valley; by car the approach is from the north, along the same valley road.