Lago Braies

Wed 17/9/25

Today we would be checking out from our apartment at Funes and proceed to Padola as our next base, in Belluno province, on the east side of the Dolomites to hike the Tre Cime di Lavaredo or Drei Zinnen in German or Three Peaks in English.

After breakfast of fried rice and packing sandwich for lunch (as usual), Partner In Crime flew the drone from in front of our apartment to capture the beautiful views in the surrounding area. Most of the national parks and tourist spot here, including the Santa Magdalena view point, did not allow drone operations.

breakfast and packed lunch menu for today

balcony view

view from apartment 

drone view

We then checked out at 9.30am, stopped by the bakery to buy a pistachio croissant (it was out of stock yesterday evening) and proceeded to Lago Braies, which is located on the way to our next base. Since this was not peak season, we did not have to make any reservations for parking. We tried to find a spot at P2 parking, but it was already full. So we went to the P3 parking lot, which we managed to get a spot and paid EUR 15 for the day. We arrived quite late, so we were thankful that were still parking available at 11.15am

There were so many tourists here, perhaps because this was an easy walk around the lake, which we strolled slowly while enjoying the views and took us about 1.5 hours, with stops for pictures and sitting at the bench by the lake to munch on our sandwiches.

Lago Braies

a bit of climb

many beautiful views at Lago Braies

We completed a 4.05km loop around Lago Braies with a leisurely walk of 1h 23m

loop around Lago Braies

We then proceeded to our apartment La Pineta in Padola (EUR 313.50 or RM 1603 ) plus city tax 6 EUR (paid by cash) for 3 nights with no breakfast. But we didn't receive any Guest Pass here. There was a signed poster of Jannik Sinner at the apartment lol. I later found out that his parent's apartment for rental is located not too far from where we were staying.

view from apartment window, no balcony this time

the kitchen - no oil, salt, pepper, kitchen tissue. comes with dishwasher

After resting a bit, we went to the nearby Eurospar for groceries shopping to top our supplies for another 3 days. We also took a picture of the quaint Padola town with the mountain as background, then prepared dinner, tonight we had chicken curry with rice.

Padola town view

dinner chicken curry 

Since we were only going to Tre Cime on the day after tomorrow on 19/9 (18/9 parking was already fully booked), I decided to do a short flat hike at the nearby Val Fiscalina for tomorrow as a teaser. I did read that it is possible to hike to Tre Cime from there, but I only found this out AFTER I paid for the parking reservation for Tre Cime.