Italian town plunged into lake seven decades ago and now reappearing

70 years ago italian town of Curon it is submerged under an artificial lake. The authorities emptied it for the interview and the spectacular ghost village it revealed itself from the bottom with its former splendor. Although bringing him back to life is not in the government’s plans, the place is filled with tourists and onlookers.

So far only a Romanesque steeple emerging from an alpine lake was the only thing left of Curon, the mountain town that has given a local color to the Val Venosta valley, in the region of Trentino Alto Adige /South Tyrol, at Italy.

In 1950, to promote the hydroelectric development of the region, the Italian authorities have decided join two lakes come and build a big stem. To achieve this, however, they had to “connect” the two lake surfaces with a third man-made lake, the Lake Resia.

Small size Resia would cover Curon. Although the protests of 160 families even came to the Vatican, the city is dived and the only testimony to its former existence was the 14th century bell tower, the badge of Curon who gave life to namesake horror series created by Netflix last year, imperfect copy of Dark, peppered with cheap but sterile teenage horror Friederich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein and Gottfried Leibniz, to be brief.

When the water reached their shoes, a handful of families in 1950 rejected the new public lands offered to them and rebuilt their lives around the city. covered with water.

This story gave a curious local flavor to the Tyrolean village. It didn’t take long for the stories of creatures and lost souls emerge from The girlfriend. Even the legend of bells ringing at midnighteven though they were no longer there. Such as dark folklore that the guardians of Curon they end with nautical tourism which nourishes them in the summer, while snowshoeing and mountain skiing are relegated to winter proposals.

Between Italy and Germany

Curón belongs to Italy, but his location on the border with Austria and Switzerland has given him a special profile that Italian writer Marco Balzano conveys, in his award-winning novel I Stay Here (2019).

The narrative plot of this supposed realistic fiction takes place precisely in Curon, between the two world wars, and recounts the idiosyncratic departure of the villagers: politically they belong to Italy, but they feel GermanThey dress as such and, of course, most speak German. Balzano reveals that Hitler became something of a superhero among the locals, who wanted the dictator to save them from Benito Mussolini’s fascism, which didn’t happen anyway.

News of Curon’s resurrection went viral when a local woman posted photos of the ruins and tweeted: “It is a strange feeling to walk on the rubble of houses.”

Other nearby towns (Arlung, Piz, Gorf and Stockerhöfe) were also submerged by the 1950s dam and increased the legend of this Atlantis Binational Zipline.

To share this experience in person, you will need to travel to the nearby town of Curon Venosta (Graun to Vinschgau, in German), from where you can easily access what remains of Curon.

mm / ds