Belluno Dolomites

Dolomiti Bellunesi National Park was created in 1990 in the province of Belluno, in the Veneto, and protects the southernmost portion of the Dolomite massif, the part that looks out over the Venetian plain. Unlike the more touristed sectors to the north, it is a territory of enclosed and thinly populated valleys, with few settlements and heavily marked by depopulation.

The rock that gives it its name, dolomite, formed in the reefs of a Triassic tropical sea, and its behaviour under erosion explains the landscape: vertical walls hundreds of metres high, spires, towers and pinnacles separated by scree, with the characteristic pink colouring at sunset. The park includes massifs such as the Schiara, the Talvena, the Pizzocco and the Monti del Sole, the last of these one of the wildest and most inaccessible sectors of the eastern Alps.

That isolation and the variety of substrates and aspects have generated a notable botanical richness, with numerous Dolomite endemics and relict species that survived on nunataks during the glaciations. The fauna is the classic alpine one: chamois, marmot, roe deer, red deer, golden eagle and capercaillie, with a growing presence of large carnivores spreading from the eastern Alps. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the Dolomites on the World Heritage List as a serial natural property of nine mountain systems across five Italian provinces, and this park contributes one of those components.