How to spend a week in the Dolomites
Favourite routes, best slices of strudel and spots we wouldn't return to.
In early September, I was lucky enough to spend a week in the Dolomites with my dad. Our intention was to do the hut-to-hut Alta Via 1 trek but, as I wrote about here, our plans changed due to Dad being injured. We booked an apartment so we could stay in one place instead and pulled together a last-minute itinerary of day tripping from some cursory research. Not quite the holiday we planned, but still a really good time.
I mostly feel reluctant to write guides to places I’ve only visited once or twice. How can I claim the “top three hikes!” in an area when they’re the only ones I’ve done? But I feel a certain amount of confidence in this cobbled-together itinerary because, as we discovered at the end of our holiday, it almost exactly matched the schedule for Explore’s 'Hiking in the Dolomites’ group trip. And presumably their research consisted of more than an hour of frantic Googling over the breakfast buffet. You’d hope, anyway.
So, while I might not have personally tested every route…