At 6:45 on the morning of 4 May 1945 an American patrol reached the hotel on the lake and took charge of 141 hostages the SS had dragged up here in the last weeks of the war: among them Léon Blum, the last prime minister of the French Third Republic, the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Greek commander-in-chief Alexandros Papagos with his entire staff, and several relatives of Claus von Stauffenberg. Lake Braies, Pragser Wildsee in German, lies at 1,496 metres in a side valley of the Puster Valley, under the wall of the Croda del Becco, which rises above it to 2,810 metres.
What to see
The lake was formed by a landslide off the Sasso del Signore that dammed the Braies stream. It covers 33 hectares, runs 1.2 kilometres long and between 300 and 400 metres wide, and drops to 36 metres, which makes it one of the deepest lakes in the province of Bolzano. In summer the surface never gets past 14 degrees, which explains why almost nobody swims and almost everybody takes one of the wooden rowing boats from the jetty instead. The old hotel and its chapel stand on the north shore, and a loop path follows the whole perimeter.
The name is a short course in local history: in 1296 the lake appears as Hünz an den Se, then as Praxersee and See in Prags, and only in 1885 is it recorded as Pragser Wildsee. That wild is a nineteenth-century addition, born with mountaineering as a mass pursuit; the Italian form arrived in 1940. Ladin legend tells it differently: the valley was held by wild men who guarded the gold of the mountains, and when herders coming up began helping themselves, the wild men opened the springs and flooded the valley floor to block their way. In the rock of the Croda del Becco opens the Sass dla Porta, the door through which, in the saga of the Fanes, the survivors of that kingdom row around the lake on every full-moon night.
Visiting
Since 2011 the lake has been in half of Italy's living rooms thanks to the television series Un passo dal cielo, filmed on its shores, and the crowds became unmanageable: in peak months the local authority has introduced compulsory booking and closes the road to private cars for much of the day, with shuttles from the Puster Valley. Check the time windows before you set out. The loop is a little over three kilometres and almost flat, an hour and more with stops: half forest track, half boardwalk and rock along the western shore. Alta Via 1 of the Dolomites, the classic route, also starts here and reaches Belluno below the Schiara in about ten stages.
Our editors' tip
We get there before eight, when the car park is still half empty and the lake is in shadow: the light comes from the east and hits the Croda del Becco before it reaches the water, which stays black and mirrors the wall better than any postcard. Then we leave the trodden shore and cross to the boardwalk side, where within twenty minutes you stop meeting anyone. And at the hotel it is worth asking about the contemporary history archive set up in 2006: it holds the papers of May 1945, and nobody looks for it.
