Stelvio National Park

Stelvio National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Stelvio is the largest national park in the Italian Alps and one of the largest in the whole range, a great block of high mountains and glaciers round the Ortler and Cevedale massifs, shared between Lombardy, Trentino and South Tyrol and bordering the Swiss National Park, and because it is so big and so divided by ridges, one chooses a valley. The Lombard side is reached by the Valtellina from Milan, three hours away, by way of Sondrio and Tirano to the old spa town of Bormio, which is the principal base: from it roads lead into the Valfurva, to the resort of Santa Caterina and the Forni valley, where a walk of an hour and a half from the car park at the Forni hut reaches the Branca refuge, facing the largest valley glacier in Italy, with a marked glaciological trail to its snout;

and into the Val Zebru, closed to private cars and served by authorised jeep taxis, the best place in the park for red deer, ibex and bearded vultures. Hut-to-hut treks of four or five days, such as those offered from the Valtellina with a mountain guide, link these valleys over high passes. On the Trentino side, the Val di Rabbi has a spectacular suspension footbridge and the Saent waterfalls, and the Val di Peio a cable car to three thousand metres; in South Tyrol, the Martell valley, the Ulten valley, with larch trees of great age, and the villages of Sulden and Trafoi, at the foot of the Ortler, are the centres. The park is free, with visitor centres in each sector. The Stelvio pass itself, at 2,757 metres, reached from Bormio or, by the famous forty-eight numbered hairpins, from Prad in South Tyrol, lies at the heart of the park and is an excursion in its own right.

Visiting Stelvio National Park: what you will see

The park was created in 1935 and enlarged in 1977 to about 1,307 square kilometres, between 650 metres and the 3,905 of the Ortler, the highest mountain of the eastern Alps outside the Bernina group and, until 1919, the highest in the Austrian empire; since 2016 its management has been divided between the two autonomous provinces and the region of Lombardy. Three quarters of it lies above two thousand metres, and it contains more than a hundred glaciers, which have lost some forty per cent of their area since the 1950s; the Forni, which a century ago filled its valley with a single tongue, has broken into three separate bodies. The road over the Stelvio pass, the second highest paved pass in the Alps, was built between 1820 and 1825 by the engineer Carlo Donegani for the Austrian emperor, to link Vienna and the Tyrol with newly acquired Lombardy without passing through Switzerland, a masterpiece of engineering with some seventy-five hairpins in all, tunnels and avalanche galleries, which was kept open all winter in the nineteenth century by teams of men with shovels; it is now a place of pilgrimage for cyclists and motorcyclists, the highest point ever reached by the Giro d'Italia, and is closed by snow for more than half the year.

From 1915 to 1918 the frontier between Italy and Austria-Hungary ran along these crests, and the Ortler and Cevedale front was the highest battlefield of the First World War, the so-called White War: soldiers lived for three winters in barracks and tunnels cut in the ice at over three thousand metres, hauled artillery to the summits, the Austrians placing guns on the top of the Ortler itself, and died in greater numbers from avalanches and cold than from the enemy. The melting glaciers now give back their remains each summer, huts, rifles, letters, cable cars, and the bodies of soldiers, and trenches, barbed wire and a wooden field hospital can be visited on marked historical trails above Santa Caterina, the Val di Peio and the pass, with museums at Bormio, Peio and Sulden. The forests are of spruce, larch and Swiss stone pine, and in the Ulten valley stand three larches reckoned to be some 850 years old, among the oldest conifers in Europe. The park holds the largest population of red deer in the Italian Alps, so many that controlled culling has been introduced amid controversy, with chamois, ibex, reintroduced from 1967, roe deer, marmots, stoats, golden eagles in more than twenty-five pairs, and the bearded vulture, which was brought back to the Alps by releases in the neighbouring Swiss park and in the Martell valley and has bred here in the wild since 1998. Bears from the Adamello population wander through, and wolves have returned.

Stelvio National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year. The summer walking season runs from mid-June to late September, with the huts staffed from about the third week of June: late June and July bring alpine flowers and lingering snow on the high passes; August is the busiest month, above all round the mid-month holiday; and September is settled and clear, with the rutting of the red deer heard at dawn and dusk in the Val Zebru and Valfurva from the middle of the month, followed by golden larches in October.

The Stelvio pass road is open from about the end of May or early June to early November, according to snow, and is closed to motor traffic on one or two days each summer for cyclists. Winter turns Bormio, Santa Caterina, Sulden and Peio into ski resorts, and the valleys offer snowshoeing and ski touring. Glacier crossings need a guide and equipment. Allow three days to a week. Bormio's thermal baths, in use since Roman times, are the classic reward, Livigno is an hour away, and the Bernina railway starts from Tirano.