Inaugurated the small port of Capolago

We have arrived at the ribbon cutting after a long and hard way, but now the small port of Capolago is at last usable. A beautiful panoramic point very close to the cycle and pedestrian trail that especially now, with the colours of autumn, is worth visiting.

Works began in November 2014: the access road to reach the lagoon public property has been restored, the anchorage plinth and the 44-meter floating dock with a chestnut parapet have been realized.

The initial hypothesis was to reconstruct the work on the basis of the already existing nineteenth-century small port, imprinted in the historical memory of the Capolago community. Precisely the numerous norms binding the protected area of the lake have instead made the municipal administration desist, who instead realized an alternative project via a boardwalk and a raft which enter into the lake.

Since 2002 they started the work to get the functional recovery of the place “Capolago Port”. It consisted in a first necessary extraordinary maintenance intervention in the rural street (280 m) that links an old dock of fishermen of Capolago, that was on the coast of the lake of Varese in the 1930s, with the provincial road S.P.1. At the first brush cutting of vegetation that grew up out of any control, also thanks to the National Alpinos Association, the Varese town hall made important the funds by the coating of rocks in the river.

Now the 44-metre-long footbridge has been inaugurate and it will be used for touristic and scientific excursions: in addition to the flora and the fauna of the lake it offers a wild forest that grew up spontaneously after the agriculture was abandoned after the second world war.

“The jetty is in three modules and it ends in front of this landscape, a platform of about 8×6 meters, as the council member explained. When the rushes grows up the jetty will be the first part of the nature. The boat moorings are five per side. In the next few days we will have a new meeting with the residents and associations of the neighbourhood to understand how to manage it and how to clean it. It is a good thing that this place survived for the residents first of all”.

After this inauguration, the second phase of the works considers the placement of an outstanding matters with the fishing cooperative with the acquisition of a piece of land of around 6,000 euros, the settlement of the access road and the placement of the poster providing information about the local flora and fauna in order to ease and encourage the guided tours. It was announced that in Spring everything will be finished.

“It was a long and complicated intervention just because we had to recognise all the very urgent restrictions which are active in this area. We would have liked to bring back the old and historic small port but maybe this solution is even more interesting for anyone who wants to enter and enjoy the amazing landscape of our lake,” explained the mayor, Attilio Fontana.

On the small port there will be 5 moorings per side. “It will be nice if in the future there is the possibility to rent some boats to visit the lake,” explained the council member, Santino.