In the far north of Italy, only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, a medieval bell tower rises alone from the blue waters of an Alpine lake. There is no church beside it, no village square and no congregation waiting for Sunday Mass. The houses it once served have disappeared. The fields surrounding them are gone, and the roads that connected the community now end beneath the surface.
The tower belongs to the old village of Curon Venosta, known in German as Graun im Vinschgau. It was not submerged by an earthquake, a landslide or an unexpected natural disaster. The village was deliberately demolished and flooded in 1950 to create a hydroelectric reservoir.
Today the scene appears peaceful. Mountains are reflected in the water and the lonely tower has become one of the most photographed landmarks in South Tyrol. Yet behind that beautiful image lies the painful story of a community forced to abandon its homes in the name of progress.
A Village on an Ancient Alpine Route
Curon stands in the upper Venosta Valley, near the Resia Pass, where Italy meets Austria and approaches Switzerland. The area has been crossed for centuries by merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and travellers moving between the Italian peninsula and central Europe.
During Roman times, the route became part of the Via Claudia Augusta, an important road connecting the Po Valley with lands beyond the Alps. In the Middle Ages, settlements grew around the mountain passes, lakes and agricultural land of the valley.
Curon appears in written records from the twelfth century. Its inhabitants were primarily German-speaking farmers who raised livestock, cultivated the limited Alpine soil and depended on a close relationship with the land. Life at approximately 1,500 metres above sea level was difficult, particularly during the long winters, but the community developed around its farms, church, cemetery and shared traditions.
Near the village stood the Church of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Its Romanesque bell tower, generally dated to the fourteenth century and associated with the year 1357, eventually became the most recognisable element of Curon.
Before the modern reservoir existed, the valley contained several natural lakes. The two most important for the future project were Lake Resia and the smaller Lake Curon, also called the Middle Lake. Farther south lay Lake San Valentino alla Muta, which remained separate.
For generations, the lakes formed part of the landscape. Nobody imagined that they would one day be expanded and joined together, swallowing the village between them.
The First Hydroelectric Plans
The idea of using the waters of the upper Venosta Valley to generate electricity appeared during the early twentieth century. Initial proposals considered raising the water level by only a few metres. Such a project would have altered the landscape but would not necessarily have destroyed Curon.
The political situation changed dramatically after the First World War. South Tyrol, previously part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was annexed to Italy under the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain. The region’s German-speaking population suddenly found itself governed by Rome.
Under Fascism, the Italian government pursued an aggressive policy of Italianisation. German place names were replaced, Italian became the official language of public administration and German-language education was restricted. Local inhabitants therefore viewed decisions arriving from distant authorities with understandable suspicion.
In 1939, the Montecatini industrial company presented a much larger hydroelectric project. Instead of raising the water level by approximately five metres, the new proposal involved an increase of about twenty-two metres. Lake Resia and Lake Curon would become a single large reservoir.
The difference was enormous. The revised project would not merely modify the village. It would erase it.
Local accounts maintain that an official notice was displayed for a limited period and written only in Italian, a language that many residents did not fully understand. Whether every detail of that episode can be reconstructed with certainty, communication was clearly inadequate and the population had little real power to influence the decision.
By the time the consequences became widely understood, the project had already acquired official approval.
War Delays the Destruction
Construction began during the Second World War but was interrupted by the conflict. For a time, the people of Curon could hope that the project had been abandoned.
Their hope did not last.
After the war, Italy urgently needed electricity for reconstruction and industrial development. Hydroelectric power was seen as essential to the country’s future. The Resia project was revived, and construction accelerated during the late 1940s.
To engineers and industrial planners, the reservoir represented energy, employment and modernisation. To the inhabitants of Curon, it meant the destruction of houses that had belonged to their families for generations.
Residents protested, sent petitions and attempted to obtain support from political and religious authorities. The local priest, Father Alfred Rieper, became one of the most determined defenders of the community. But the balance of power was overwhelmingly against them.
The reservoir had been approved, large investments had been made and post-war Italy was hungry for electricity. The village stood in the path of a project considered too important to stop.
The Price of Progress
Creating Lake Resia required the sacrifice of 163 homes and approximately 523 hectares of cultivated land. Curon was destroyed almost completely, while part of the nearby settlement of Resia was also affected.
The official numbers cannot fully describe what was lost. A farm was not simply a building. It was a family’s home, workplace, savings and inheritance. Agricultural land in an Alpine valley was particularly valuable because usable soil was limited. Compensation could not easily replace fields cultivated over generations.
Some residents accepted new accommodation nearby. Others left the valley in search of work and a new beginning. Families were divided, neighbours were separated and the social structure of the old village was broken apart.
The replacement houses were constructed higher on the eastern side of the valley. Although the new settlement carried the name Curon, it could not immediately reproduce the relationships, memories and identity of the old community.
For some displaced inhabitants, the new houses felt less like homes than emergency shelters. They possessed modern conveniences that many old farmhouses had lacked, but they did not contain the history of the families moved into them.
A village is not simply a collection of walls. It is also the position of a kitchen window, the path to a neighbour’s house, the sound of footsteps in the church square and the memory of generations buried in the same ground. None of these things could be reconstructed by engineers.
The Last Days of Old Curon
During the summer of 1950, the final destruction began.
Possessions were removed from houses, religious objects were rescued from the church and human remains were transferred from the cemetery. Buildings were emptied and demolished before the water arrived. This is why it is misleading to imagine an entirely intact village standing beneath the lake. What remained underwater were principally foundations, cellars, fragments of walls and sections of the old roads.
On 9 July 1950, the inhabitants reportedly attended the final Sunday service in their parish church and then walked out in procession. The bells were removed on 18 July.
Several days later, the church and the surviving buildings were demolished with explosives.
The medieval bell tower was spared because it was recognised as a historic monument. Everything around it disappeared, leaving the tower standing without its church.
As the dam closed and the waters rose, meadows vanished first. Paths disappeared, then walls and foundations. The surface of the new reservoir eventually covered the place where generations of people had lived.
Curon Vecchia had ceased to exist.
The artificial Lake Resia, lying at approximately 1,498 metres above sea level, became the largest lake in the province of Bolzano. It provided the hydroelectric system with an enormous reserve of water. The project achieved its technical purpose, but the cost was paid by the people whose village had been erased.
The basic figures—163 homes and 523 hectares of land—are documented in accounts of the reservoir’s construction. Lake Resia historical overview
The Tower That Would Not Disappear
The bell tower survived the demolition, but nobody could have predicted the symbolic power it would acquire.
Rising from the lake, it became a monument to everything that had been lost. Its stone walls resisted water, ice and Alpine weather, although decades of immersion caused damage that later required restoration.
During winter, the lake sometimes froze around the tower, creating the extraordinary appearance of a building standing in a field of ice. When the water level fell, portions of the foundations and old roads occasionally became visible again.
In 2021, maintenance work caused the reservoir to be temporarily lowered. Remains of old Curon emerged from the water, including steps, walls, cellars and sections of road. Photographs circulated around the world, and for a brief period the physical traces of the lost village could be seen once more.
For former residents and their descendants, however, this was not the discovery of a picturesque ruin. It was the reappearance of a painful family landscape.
The tower now represents two opposing ideas. It is an internationally admired landmark that attracts visitors to the region, but it is also evidence of a community sacrificed to an industrial project.
Its beauty cannot be separated from its history.
The Legend of the Submerged Bells
According to the most famous legend associated with Curon, people walking near the tower on cold winter nights can sometimes hear church bells ringing beneath the frozen lake.
The story is powerful: bells calling from a drowned village, perhaps announcing a Mass that can never be celebrated or reminding the living that the old community has not been forgotten.
But the historical truth is clear. The bells were removed from the tower on 18 July 1950, before the church was destroyed and before the village disappeared beneath the water. There are no bells inside the submerged tower.
The legend therefore cannot be understood as a literal event. It belongs instead to the emotional memory of the village. The people of Curon heard those bells throughout their lives. They marked religious services, funerals, celebrations and emergencies. When the bells were removed, one of the most familiar sounds of the community vanished.
Perhaps that is why the story survives. The bells continue to ring not beneath the lake, but in the memory of the valley.
Curon Between History and Fiction
The mysterious appearance of the tower has inspired novels, documentaries, photographs and television productions. The Italian Netflix series Curon transformed the area into the setting for a supernatural story involving disappearances, doubles and secrets.
That fictional narrative has little connection with the true events of 1950, but it helped make the location internationally famous.
The real history needs no supernatural invention. A German-speaking Alpine village was destroyed after its territory passed to Italy; its residents resisted a powerful industrial company; their homes were demolished; the valley was flooded; and a medieval tower remained standing as the only visible witness.
That story is already haunting enough.
The documentary Il paese sommerso, or The Submerged Village, collected memories of the displaced population and helped return attention to the human cost of the reservoir. The Upper Venosta Valley Museum also preserves photographs, documents and objects connected with the destruction and reconstruction of Curon and Resia.
These materials reveal a world very different from the silent landscape tourists see today. Old Curon was not a ruin or a romantic collection of mountain cottages. It was a living community filled with children, farmers, shopkeepers, religious ceremonies and ordinary arguments between neighbours.
The lake did not cover an empty place. It covered people’s lives.
What Remains Beneath the Water
Visitors sometimes imagine streets lined with complete houses beneath Lake Resia. In reality, most buildings were demolished before the flooding. The lake hides foundations, cellars, fragments of masonry and the original shape of the valley rather than a perfectly preserved underwater town.
Yet the absence of intact buildings does not make the story less powerful. On the contrary, the deliberate demolition shows how complete the transformation was. The residents were not temporarily evacuated from a place they might later reclaim. Their village was physically dismantled to ensure that the reservoir could be created.
Only the tower escaped.
Its survival changed the meaning of the entire project. Without it, Lake Resia might appear to be an ordinary Alpine reservoir. With it, nobody can look across the water without wondering what happened there.
The tower acts almost like an accusation made of stone.
The Two Faces of Lake Resia
Today Lake Resia is used for sailing, fishing, hiking, winter sports and international sporting events. Its winds have made it popular with kitesurfers, while the surrounding mountains attract visitors throughout the year.
Tourism has brought economic opportunities to the valley, and the image of the submerged tower now appears on postcards, websites and travel advertisements. Curon has become famous precisely because old Curon was destroyed.
This creates an uncomfortable paradox. The structure preserved as a reminder of loss has also become the region’s greatest attraction. Visitors admire its beauty, while local families remember the houses and fields lying beneath the water.
Both perspectives are real. The lake is beautiful, and its creation caused profound suffering. The reservoir produced electricity, and a community paid the price. The new village survived, but the old village could never be recreated.
History rarely offers a simple choice between progress and injustice. Curon forces us to look at both.
The Silent Witness
The bell tower of Curon no longer calls anyone to church. It has no bells, no nave and no village square. Yet it communicates more powerfully than many monuments deliberately built to preserve history.
It tells us that landscapes can be engineered, borders can change and entire communities can be moved when governments and industries decide that a project is necessary. It also reminds us that economic compensation cannot replace belonging.
The water of Lake Resia is calm today. Beneath it lie the remains of fields, houses and roads that once formed the centre of another world. Above it stands a tower that was never intended to become a monument.
And when winter comes, people still say that the bells of Curon can be heard beneath the ice.
Historically, the bells are gone. But perhaps legends are not created because people believe metal is ringing underwater. Perhaps they are created because some losses are too deep to remain silent.