Home » Italy » Mountainbike excursions at Lake Garda in Italy

Our Italy tour this year (April 1995) visited two places, the Dolomites and Garda Lake not far to the southwest. Our <a href=http://www.odyssei.com/travel-article/3559.html> Dolomites excursions</a> are described on a separate page.

Mountainbike excursions at Lake Garda in Italy

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-16 10:16:07

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LAKE GARDA

Lake Garda is also in northern Italy, southwest of the Dolomites and in the southern end of the Alps. There is a variety of mountains, none as high as in the central Alps but all challenging to ride, and more accessible. We stayed in Riva del Garda, a town at the northwestern tip of Lake Garda. The Lira was weak at the time, so we went to the best hotel of Riva (the Hotel du lac et du parc) and rented a bungalow in a park at the edge of the lake.

There are two major roads out of Riva, towards Monte Brione to the east, and south towards Monte Tremalzo and others. Monte Brione is good for short but difficult tours; this hill is roughly elliptic, with the west side nearly on level with the lake and the east end sloping up and then dropping sharply. It looks like a large cylinder buried at an angle. There is a Worldcup trail along the steep east edge and plenty of single trails. A road leads up and ends at a large bunker near the top. Monte Brione was crowded with mountainbikers when we were there, it has terrain for everybody.

The longer and more challenging rides, including the one I will focus on in this page, starts to the south of Riva. A road leads south along the edge of the lake. Shortly after the city limits, we turned right onto an abandoned and closed road; it looks like a parking lot. There are many tunnels along this road, and we had to lift our bicycles over a gate at the entrance to the first (in summer 1995, a fence has been installed and was promptly destroyed; in 2001 parts of the tunnels collapsed and the road has become inaccessible). Abandoned means that the tunnels are nearly unlighted but ridable. The picture (1) shows one of the reasons why the road was abandoned: large boulders slid down the hill and broke through the large steel reinforcement bars visible in the center. The picture proves that the damage was caused by a little misstep of my friend posing between the ...

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