Hiking in the mountains instead of on the mountains: rock walls tower 400 metres up into the Dolomite sky on either side, revealing a vast range of rock colours and formations and telling one of the most exciting sto-ries of all: 40+ million years of the history of the Earth

A journey through the history of the Earth

The GEOPARC Bletterbach offers fans of geology and of history, as well as hikers and families, the chance to take a trip into the Earth’s past: the Bletterbach gorge has been formed by weathering – all since the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago - and erosion. The otherwise unremarkable Bletterbach stream has nonethe-less carved its way into the rocks, unhindered, along a path that is now 8 kilometres long and 400 metres wide. The rock layers thus now exposed to our admiring gaze not only tell us about the climate that existed 250 million years ago, but also about the flora and fauna of the time – as there is no shortage of fossils in the Bletterbach gorge!