Tre Cime di Lavaredo

Three stone towers rise above the Piani di Lavaredo: Cima Piccola, Cima Grande and Cima Ovest, aligned like a battlement above Auronzo di Cadore.

Why it matters

The Tre Cime are the most recognisable profile in the Dolomites and the centrepiece of the "Northern Dolomites", the fifth of the nine systems that make up the UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed in 2009. The Dolomites UNESCO Foundation counts the triple peaks of Lavaredo among the best-known chains of the whole site, within the most extensive system, whose rocks record different environments succeeding one another over more than 270 million years. The individual towers make the numbers concrete: Cima Grande 2,999 m, Cima Ovest 2,973 m, Cima Piccola 2,857 m. The towers rise above the Piani di Lavaredo, part of the UNESCO-listed Northern Dolomites system.

What to notice

The mountain group comprises broad southern slabs, Cima Piccola's Spigolo Giallo and the north faces above Locatelli, all features in the history of Dolomite mountaineering. Ledges on nearby Monte Paterno were used during the First World War.

Context and history

The highest summit was first climbed in 1869 by Paul Grohmann, in the pioneering wave when British and Alpine climbers opened these walls with local hunters as guides and porters. The Province of Bolzano's nature park portal recalls how abruptly that era ended: in May 1915 the peaceful conquest of the mountains stopped, and for two and a half years a high-mountain war between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies ran along these ridges, with tens of thousands of soldiers supplied through the winters. Its editors note that the plateau of the Tre Cime is still scattered with rusting grenade splinters — a rare case where a battlefield and a world-famous landscape are the same ground. In 2009 the peaks became part of the Dolomites World Heritage inscription.