Lago di Livigno

Lake Livigno is not a glacial gift but a piece of engineering: a reservoir begun in 1962, split down the middle by the Italy–Switzerland border, and worked hard every winter for electricity. Its broad shore is also part of the landscape around Livigno.

Why it matters

The water that stretches northeast from the last houses of Livigno is one of the largest artificial basins in the Alps' central chain, and its story is unusual even by dam standards. The Swiss operator Engadiner Kraftwerke describes a double-curvature arch dam whose crest runs 540 metres across the valley, holding a lake with a surface of 4.7 square kilometres; when full, the waterline sits at about 1,805 metres and the basin reaches roughly nine kilometres up the Val di Livigno toward Santa Maria, with another arm pushing 4.5 kilometres into the Val del Gallo. The state border crosses the dam itself, and the greater part of the water lies on Italian territory. The purpose is storage: inflows gathered in summer are released through turbines in winter, when the Alps need power most. The reservoir is both a working part of the regional energy system and a defining feature of Livigno's landscape.

What to notice

The village side has a broad shoreline. Between a maximum water level of about 1,804.7 metres and a minimum of 1,735 metres, a wide drawdown band marks how much water is released for winter energy. At the head of the lake stands the church of the Immacolata di Viera, dismantled in the 1960s when its original site was flooded and rebuilt in 1994 at the reservoir's new shore. The Munt La Schera tunnel, first built to serve construction of the dam, is another part of the landscape shaped by the project.

Context and history

The lake exists because two states negotiated. Specialist dam literature records the 1957 agreement that settled the water uses of the Spöl valley between Italy and Switzerland, after which construction could begin: works on the Punt dal Gall dam started in June 1962 and the structure was completed on 18 October 1968, built for Engadiner Kraftwerke by an Italian-Swiss consortium. The reservoir began filling with the 1969 snowmelt and reached its maximum level only in August 1971. The dam flooded the valley floor upstream of the village, submerging farmland and the old site of Viera, and the Swiss company dug the Munt La Schera road tunnel to reach the works. Inaugurated at the end of the 1960s, it later connected Livigno with the north. The reservoir now also forms part of the landscape around Livigno.