Tre Cime di Lavaredo

Three blunt towers of pale rock standing side by side on a high, stony plateau: the Tre Cime, or Drei Zinnen, are the emblem of the Dolomites, and their north faces are among the most famous walls in the Alps. The central and highest, Cima Grande, reaches 2,999 metres, with Cima Ovest at 2,973 metres to the west and the slender Cima Piccola at 2,857 metres to the east. They are built of the thick, regular beds of the Dolomia Principale, laid down in a warm sea more than two hundred million years ago, and the horizontal banding of those layers is clearly visible on the walls. The massif sits on the boundary between South Tyrol and the province of Belluno in the Sexten Dolomites, and since 2009 it has been part of the Dolomites World Heritage Site.

The towers have two faces. From the south, where the road arrives, they show their broad shoulders above scree. The celebrated view opens from the north, around the Rifugio Locatelli (Dreizinnenhütte, 2,438 m), where the three peaks stand in a single composition, sheer and dark against the evening sky, their bases lost in slopes of grey debris. The circuit around them, starting at the Rifugio Auronzo at 2,320 metres, covers roughly nine to ten kilometres and a few hundred metres of ascent, and it shows the massif changing shape from every side.

The Tre Cime also hold a central place in climbing history. Paul Grohmann, with the guides Franz Innerkofler and Peter Salcher, first reached the summit of Cima Grande in 1869; Michel Innerkofler climbed Cima Ovest in 1879 and, with Hans Innerkofler, Cima Piccola in 1881. In 1933 Emilio Comici and his companions spent three days and two nights on the north face of Cima Grande, a climb that became a landmark of the steep direct style. Two decades earlier the plateau had been a battlefield: from 1915 to 1917 the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies fought here in the mountain war of the First World War, and remains of fortifications and memorials to the fallen can still be seen among the rocks.

Getting there

The Tre Cime rise above Misurina, about 53 km from Belluno. The nearest airport is Treviso (TSF), roughly 108 km away. A toll road climbs from the Misurina area to the Rifugio Auronzo, the usual start of the circuit; in summer bus 444 runs to the Rifugio Auronzo from the railway station of Toblach (Dobbiaco) in the Puster Valley.