Innichen

The second stop for our month-long discovery of the Dolomites was the delightful town of Innichen, also known as San Candido in Italian or Sanciana in the regional Ladin dialect.  Innichen lies in a dramatic setting on the floor of the Val Pusteria, which runs eastward from Fortezza all the way to the Austrian border.  Innichen is actually located just a few miles from Austria and in pre-EU times was the site of an important border crossing.

History runs deep here with the earliest settlements believed to date back as far as 1000 BC.  The two main churches are decidedly newer, but even those are impressively old by American standards.  The cathedral of San Candido, also referred to as the La Collegiata di San Candido, dates to the middle of the 12th century.  Its blockish Romanesque architecture is quite foreboding and is very much in contrast with the dramatic Baroque styling of the Chiesa di San Michele, ca. 1735.   San Michele is especially hard to miss with the gold gilt statues on the facade facing the town square.  Both churches have stunning (albeit very different) interiors and are well worth a visit.

This is not to say that everything in the area is old; in fact Innichen partnered with the neighboring town of Dobbiaco to make a very modern (and award-winning) investment in renewable energy.  The two towns are now served by a shared centralized heating plant that burns waste products from the wood and timber industry to generate electricity for the grid as well as steam for use in heating nearby homes and businesses.  In a clever twist, even the spent steam is run through heat exchangers to produce domestic hot water.

As with the rest of Südtirol, this region was actually part of Austria until immediately after World War I when it was granted to Italy as part of Austria’s war reparations.  Even a century later the people, language, architecture, and food found here are still very much Germanic – as a matter of fact the 2011 census reported that 85% of the population still spoke German as their first language.

Travel to Innichen was quite easy.  We hopped on a Südtirolmobil bus #460 near the Ustaria Posta for a ride down the Val Badia to Brunico.  In Brunico we boarded a regional Pustertalbahn train towards Lienz.  This took us along the Val Pusteria through Niederdorf and Dobbiaco (familiar territory from our January 2020 visit) to the bahnhof in Innichen.  It was only two hours of travel – much less than the 28 hour marathon required to reach Badia earlier in the week.

Innichen was a great location for us given that we relied, as usual, on buses and trains to get around.  The town’s Bahnhof gave us regional train access and there were also good bus connections, all just a short walk from our apartment.  As a result staying in Innichen enabled us to visit nearby landmarks such as the iconic Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the beautiful Fischleintal valley, and the Instagram saturated Lago di Braies.  Innichen was also our starting point for a visit to Passo Giau where we found the trailhead for a lovely trek from Croda da Lago to Cortina d’Ampezzo.  Read our blog below for more details about all of these adventures.

The managers for our lodging in Innichen, the Zin Senfter Residence, told us to contact them upon our arrival so that they could send a car to pick us up at the Bahnhof.  This was much appreciated as it saved us from having to drag our roller duffels roughly a kilometer over city streets.  We arrived just in time for their complementary daily ‘afternoon snack’, a.k.a. Happy Hour, in the on-site bistro.  Don’t let the ‘Residence’ part of the name fool you – this property is unlike any that we’ve stayed in during earlier trips to Europe.  Four modern farmhouse-style structures housing the apartments were arranged to create a central courtyard called the Piazzetta Senfter.  The Piazzetta (literally ‘small square’) included a bistro, a clothing store, a sporting goods shop, a beauty shop, and even a bakery.  There was also a delicatessen stocked with a wide variety of regional specialties.  Of note, the family that owns this resort complex also owns a large speck and sausage manufacturing company in town, so you can guess where most of the deli’s meat products came from!

While this was our first time staying in Innichen, we had previously walked around the town back in January of 2020 when we spent twelve days just down the road in Dobbiaco.  As a result we were confident that Innichen would work well for our style of travel.  We were very happy with how this visit evolved and hope to return soon!