Ospitale di Cadore

The village is named after its trade: from the year one thousand it grew around a hospice, founded in the tenth century for the travellers who made their way up the Piave valley. The building is still there, in the upper part of the village, and keeps a Gothic mullioned window documented from the fourteenth century. In 1511 the troops of Maximilian of Habsburg, who were after the castle of the Gardona, set fire to it: but the hospital did not close, and it was still working in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Above Davestra, on a shelf at seven hundred metres, stood a village that made iron: the excavations of 1995 brought up slag in great quantity, dry-stone walls and small furnaces for reducing the ore, and the pottery allowed the site to be dated to around the year one thousand. That slag can be seen today in the village primary school. A little further north, on the first bend of the road up to the Val Bona, the ruts left by carts on the Roman road are still there.