Perca

The arms of Perca are also a map: there is a stag's horn, standing for hunting and for the woods, and its points are six, as many as the hamlets of the comune; below, a ploughshare, for farming. The name, instead, is a tree: it comes from Middle High German birhe, the birch, and is recorded as Pircha and Perchach already in 1189. The village lies in the Val Pusteria, at the foot of Plan de Corones, and in one of its hamlets, at Plata, there are the earth pyramids, those pinnacles that erosion leaves standing with a stone on top. The churches tell of the scattering of the settlements: San Colombano at Montevila is Romanesque and goes back to the eleventh century, San Giacomo at Nessano is of 1474, San Nicolò at Vila di Sopra of 1523 and the parish church of San Cassiano, late gothic, of 1525.

The oldest settlement is that of Wielenberg, mentioned in writing already between 1070 and 1080 as locus Welinberc; in 1091 it was given to the cathedral chapter of Bressanone, and in the middle of the fourteenth century the lords of Prey settled there, living in houses that still exist — Genner, Joas, Leitl. In 1348 the plague swept away almost the whole population. Much later, in 1939, between the two hamlets of the valley the bunkers of the Alpine Wall were built, what is called the barrier of Perca. Today the village is stitched together in a way all its own: since December 2010 it has a railway station on the valley floor, by the Rienza, joined to the lower part of the built-up area by two public lifts and to the slopes of Plan de Corones by a gondola; and from the mountain a ski run seven kilometres long comes down as far as the station.