Reschensee

In the 1920s the Italian company Montecatini began planning a hydroelectric reservoir in this high Alpine valley, and by the time the dam was finished, in 1949, the project had merged two natural lakes and drowned the villages of Graun and part of Resia. The waters rose in 1950, swallowing 163 homes and, with them, the parish church of Curon. Locals fought the plan for years — petitions, appeals to Rome, a decade of delay — but the reservoir went ahead anyway, and the valley's older village disappeared beneath it for good.

One piece of it never went under completely. The 14th-century bell tower of that church was simply left standing as the water rose around it, too solid and too tall to bother demolishing, and it has jutted from the surface ever since — the only visible trace of a place that otherwise exists only in memory and old photographs. It has become the valley's emblem, printed on everything from hiking maps to wine labels.

In May 2021, engineers partially drained the reservoir for maintenance work, and for a few weeks the waterline dropped far enough to expose the actual stone foundations of the old village around the tower's base — walls and thresholds nobody living had ever walked on, briefly visible again after seventy years underwater.

Good to know

When the lake freezes over in deep winter, you can walk — or, with skates rented from nearby villages — glide straight out across the ice to the base of the tower, turning a drowned landmark into one of the more surreal short outings in the Alps.

Getting there

50 km from Merano. Bolzano Airport (BZO) is about 72 km away.