Almost everyone knows the front door and ignores the house. The door is Lake Braies, with its wooden boathouse and the queue of people waiting their turn for the photograph; the house is what lies above, over the rim of the basin: three high plateaus, Fanes, Sennes and Fosses, where the Dolomites stop being walls and become wide, silent prairies of pale stone, with whistling marmots and no roads. The nature park was set up in 1980 and covers more than twenty-five thousand hectares.
What to see
The plateaus are the reason to come: you climb in three or four hours from San Vigilio di Marebbe, from Lake Braies or from the Col de Locia pass above San Cassiano, and up there you walk for hours across a flat world at two thousand metres, among sinkholes, small lakes and mountain dairies. The surrounding peaks reach three thousand metres, and the park borders the Tre Cime park to the east: we are inside the Dolomites declared a world heritage site in 2009.
Fanes is the setting of the Ladin legends of the kingdom of the same name, with princess Dolasilla and her allied marmots: this is not postcard folklore, it is the epic of a language spoken by a few tens of thousands of people, and those who know it walk here with a different mind. On the other side, at Prato Piazza, the broad grassy bowl under the Picco di Vallandro keeps an Austro-Hungarian fort of the Great War, now a ruin, with a view that explains by itself why it was built there.
Visiting
In summer, car access to the Braies valley and to Prato Piazza is regulated with bookings and shuttle buses: check before setting out, because without a permit you will be turned back. The plateaus are reached only on foot; the Fanes, Sennes, Fodara Vedla and Biella refuges let you sleep up there and open in the summer season. The park is crossed by high routes one and three. In winter you go with touring skis or snowshoes.
Our editors' tip
If you have only half a day and you are at the lake, do not walk the circuit and turn back like everyone else: take the path climbing towards the saddle under the Croda del Becco. Forty minutes of ascent are enough to leave ninety-five per cent of people behind, and from up there you see the whole lake, green, tiny and silent.