Inside the abandoned Italian ski resort enjoying an unlikely renaissance
On the snow-covered summit ridge overlooking the Italian village of Gaver, the bright red bullwheel looks like a relic from a bygone industrial age. This giant pulley was once the top of a busy ski lift, its path still visible beneath the line of rusting steel pylons running down the hillside. But the last time anyone queued to ski here was a decade ago, and the engine, cables, and buttons have long since been sold for scrap.
Abandoned lifts like this have become a depressingly common sight across the Alps, as rising global temperatures make it increasingly difficult for lower-lying ski areas to operate. The lack of snow made headlines this January when it forced several famous French ski resorts to close.
Many were subsequently able to re-open, but the past two decades have seen dozens of smaller operations shut down for good. There are 249 permanently-closed ski lifts scattered across now-empty hills in Italy alone, according to a recent report by Legamambiente, the country’s leading environmental NGO.
Yet in Gaver, this rusting infrastructure doesn’t tell the full story. The big wheel at the top stopped turning in 2014, but in recent years, this small ski resort in Lombardy has enjoyed an unlikely renaissance – thanks largely thanks to the vision of one enterprising hotel owner.
At 54, Stefano Marca, who runs the Blumon Break Hotel with his wife, Marika, is old enough to remember Gaver’s golden age. “It was good here in the 80s and 90s,” he said. “Ask anyone in Brescia [the nearest big city] where they learned to ski, and most of them will say ‘Gaver’.”
Shortly after the turn of the century, however, a sequence of bad winters combined with worse financial decision-making to send the resort into a downward spiral.
Dwindling visitor numbers meant a lack of funds to upgrade ageing facilities, which in turn meant people began to ski elsewhere. Although the village sits at 1,500m above sea level, Gaver was never big enough or profitable enough to justify the huge investment in snow cannons and infrastructure that has kept other lower resorts in business. And at the end of the 2013-14 season, the lifts closed for the last time.
“When they closed the lifts, the hotels closed and people left,” Marca said. But having grown up with the Blumon Break as his family’s business, Stefano wasn’t going to give up on Gaver so easily. As a lifelong fan of ski touring, he knew the resort had potential, with plenty of more snow-sure terrain over 2,000m. It was just a question of persuading people to look beyond the lifts.
So he set to work: redrawing the piste map to show touring routes instead of runs, investing in a fleet of rental skis equipped with the pin bindings and skins needed for ski touring, and keeping his hotel open throughout the winter, to welcome those who came to explore for themselves.
Ski touring has become increasingly popular in recent years, as growing numbers of people around the world embrace the physical and environmental benefits of self-powered skiing over energy-guzzling lifts. In Europe, its growth was super-charged by the pandemic, when ski lifts were closed in many countries including Italy.
Even accounting for these outside influences, however, the turnaround in Gaver’s fortunes has been remarkable. Marca said that when the lifts were running, the resort needed 100 to 200 skiers a day to break even, and struggled. These days, on a busy Saturday or Sunday they will have more than 1,000. “There are weekends where you can’t find a parking spot here”.
Even on a week day in late March, at the end of a season where snow had been in short supply, we found a handful of cars in the carpark. As we readied our bags, we got chatting to Daniele Melzani, a 27-year-old from Bagolino, a village down the valley, who’d just returned from an early morning tour.
Ironically, given the cause of its demise, Gaver is actually a relatively snowy spot, he said. Stefano Marca agreed. “It's quite humid, and the shape of the valley is sheltered with a lot of north facing slopes,” he explained. “There are higher resorts, at 1,800m, that don’t get the same snow as here.”
This assessment was borne out as we toured up the old pistes. Given the snow conditions elsewhere in the region, and the fact that none of it was artificial, there was an impressive amount of the white stuff still around. It’s one of the things that attracts Renato Cardin, a chatty, 60-year-old retiree from Brescia, who stopped to talk as he skied down solo. “There’s always snow here, but it’s relatively safe, because it used to be piste, so I can ski by myself without having to worry about avalanches,” he explained.
But the main reason he loves Gaver is the atmosphere. “It reminds me of skiing in the seventies. You go to a modern resort and it’s all ‘boom, boom, boom’, disco-style music on the pistes.” It’s not that he doesn’t like dancing, he said, but it’s not what he wants when he comes to the mountains. “Here, I reach the peak and the silence is beautiful.”
As a touring-only resort, Gaver is certainly quiet – sometimes eerily so. The old chairlift control room we found halfway up felt like something from a Cold War disaster movie, with clunky, sixties-style dials, hastily-abandoned books, and a big red button which looked like it might launch a rusting nuclear warhead.
An ancient Compaq computer – complete with floppy disk drive and a Windows 95 logo – gathered dust on a desk, and above it, on the 2013 wall calendar, someone had scribbled inizio stagione – “start of the season” – little knowing, presumably, that it would be the lift’s last.
If these antiques were fascinating, Gaver’s real appeal only became clear when we reached the summit ridge of Monte Misa (2,184m). Beneath us, the mountain’s north face dropped down into a huge, open bowl, with endless lines to choose from. To our right, another open powder field led down into the trees, while behind us lay the 2,843m-high peak of Cornone di Blumone, with more ways down than you could ever hope to ski in a single winter.
Back at its namesake hotel in the village, Marika served up a lunch of homemade casoncelli – Brescia’s answer to ravioli – stuffed with Bagoss, a tangy-tasting cheese made in the Gaver valley, before Stefano showed us round the ski room.
Alongside the touring kit, there were cross country skis and snowshoes available for rent, and on one patch of the ceiling, a whole series of racing bib numbers. “Those are my daughter’s,” he explained. “She’s in the under-20 Italian national ski touring team.” His 14-year-old son is also an enthusiast, he said, “so we’re lucky that they have inherited our passion.”
In the car park, I’d been struck by a single word of English graffitied onto a concrete barrier. With the peaks behind it largely denuded of snow, someone had written “Future?” — pointedly punctuated with a question mark.
As the climate crisis continues to bite, the long-term prospects for skiing in Europe are far from certain. But in this little corner of Italy at least, there’s still plenty of hope for the next generation.
