Lake Vedana

About

The Lake Vedana is a small body of water of glacial origin located in the municipal territory of Sospirolo, in the Province of Belluno, Italy. Situated just south of the Monti del Sole range, and a few kilometers east of the larger Lake Mis, it has no inflows or outflows, forming an endorheic basin.

The lake lies in an area of great naturalistic interest, at the gateway to the Belluno Dolomites National Park; it occupies a small depression caused by an ancient bed of the Cordevole river, within an area called Masiere, a wide expanse of large boulders and debris now largely covered by pioneer vegetation.

Lake Vedana and the peaty meadows of “Le Torbe” constitute “wetland oases”; the lake is fed by underground water veins, along the direction of an ancient abandoned valley of the Cordevole stream. The “Le Torbe” meadows likely represent the final evolutionary stage of a marsh (or lake-marsh) environment settled in a marginal depression, surrounded by coarse glacial deposits and characterized by slow and difficult drainage, with a substrate of silty-sandy soils. Near San Gottardo, the Certosa di Vedana, an ancient Carthusian monastery, is located.

The importance of this lake was noted by Caldart (1962), a Belluno naturalist, and later included among the biotopes worthy of special conservation in a historic volume published by the Società botanica italiana as part of a census conducted by the University of Camerino in 1979.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.