At first, the bell tower appears almost too perfectly placed. It rises from the blue-green water of Lake Resia with snow-covered mountains behind it, solitary and improbably beautiful. In winter, ice sometimes closes around its stone walls; in summer, its reflection stretches across the lake. It is easy to understand why this has become one of the most photographed views in South Tyrol.

Yet the tower is not a romantic ruin built for the landscape. It is the last visible fragment of a village that disappeared beneath it.

Below the surface lies Old Curon, known in German as Alt-Graun. Its homes, farms, streets and church were demolished or submerged in 1950, when two natural lakes were joined to create a hydroelectric reservoir. The people who lived there were displaced, their land was expropriated and a community that had developed over centuries was forced to begin again on higher ground.

The image may look like a fairy tale. Its history does not.

Before the lake

The landscape around Curon Venosta, close to the borders of Austria and Switzerland, has always been shaped by water and mountains. Before the modern reservoir existed, the upper Val Venosta contained two smaller natural lakes: Lake Resia and Lake Curon. Villages, cultivated fields and farmsteads occupied the land between and around them, while the Romanesque bell tower of Curon’s church had stood in the valley since the late 14th century.

South Tyrol itself carried a complicated political history. Formerly part of Austria-Hungary, the region became Italian after the First World War, although much of its population remained German-speaking. During the following decades, industrial expansion and the growing demand for electricity turned the Alpine waters into an increasingly valuable resource.

Plans to create a reservoir existed from the 1920s, but the scale of the final project changed dramatically. According to South Tyrol’s official account of the events, residents initially expected a rise in the water level of around five metres. In 1940, however, a notice announced a new level of 22 metres. It was posted in Italian, a language many local residents could not understand, and the lack of formal objections was later treated as acceptance.

For the people of Curon, the decision had effectively been made without them.

The year the village disappeared

Construction resumed after the Second World War, and between 1949 and 1950 the Montecatini company completed the dam. The natural lakes of Resia and Curon were merged into one large artificial reservoir for hydroelectric production.

The consequences were permanent. Homes and public buildings were destroyed, agricultural land vanished and families were ordered to leave. The old village was gradually demolished as the water rose around it. Some residents moved to the newly constructed Curon nearby, while others left the area altogether, breaking apart relationships and routines that could not simply be rebuilt with new walls.

Official regional accounts describe approximately 1,200 people losing their homes across the affected community. Compensation was often insufficient to recreate what families had lost, because a farm was not only a building and a field was not merely a unit of land. They represented livelihood, inheritance and belonging.

The church was demolished, but its separate bell tower was spared and placed under monument protection. When the reservoir filled, the stone structure remained above the surface — no longer part of a village, yet still marking its location.

The bells that no longer exist

The tower’s isolation eventually produced a legend. On cold and windy nights, people say, the bells of Old Curon can still be heard ringing beneath the water. The story persists even though the bells were removed before the village was flooded.

Like many legends, it expresses something that historical records cannot fully contain. The imagined sound gives a voice back to a place that was physically silenced. It suggests that a community does not disappear simply because its buildings are gone, and that memory can continue to surface long after a landscape has been rewritten.

For visitors who do not know the history, the tower is mysterious. For the families who remember Old Curon, it is evidence.

From tragedy to travel icon

Over time, Lake Resia became a destination for hiking, cycling, skiing, windsurfing and snowkiting. The bell tower appeared on postcards, travel campaigns and social media, and its surreal image later inspired novels and the Netflix series Curon. What began as the remnant of a forced displacement became the region’s most recognisable landmark.

That transformation creates an uncomfortable tension. Tourism helps preserve and share the story, but photography can also strip the tower of its meaning. Framed against mountains and water, it is easy to see only an unusual composition and forget that the lake is also a place of loss.

The most responsible way to visit Curon is not to reject its beauty, but to look beyond it. The tower can be both visually extraordinary and historically painful. These truths do not cancel each other; together, they explain why the place feels so powerful.

Reading the landscape differently

Standing beside Lake Resia today, there is little to reveal the scale of what once occupied the valley. Water smooths the terrain and creates the illusion that the lake has always been there. The bell tower interrupts that illusion. It functions like a marker placed between two versions of the same landscape: the one visible now and the one remembered by those who lived there before 1950.

Travellers can learn more about the former village through the local historical exhibition and the information around the lakeshore. Old photographs are particularly revealing. They return streets, roofs and people to the empty space surrounding the tower, transforming an abstract story of development into the loss of specific homes.

Curon also asks a wider question that reaches far beyond South Tyrol: what is considered an acceptable sacrifice in the name of progress, and who is allowed to decide? Hydroelectric power helped supply northern Italy with energy, but the benefits were distributed far beyond the community that paid the most immediate price.

This does not make Lake Resia a place without value in the present. It makes it a landscape that should be read carefully.

What remains above the water

More than seven decades after the flooding, the bell tower continues to stand. Depending on the season and the water level, more or less of its base becomes visible, but the essential image remains unchanged: a stone structure rising where no structure should be.

Its endurance has turned it into something the engineers who built the reservoir may never have intended. The tower is no longer simply part of a church, nor merely a tourist landmark. It is a memorial without walls, a reminder that landscapes can hold political decisions as clearly as monuments hold names.

Visitors arrive for the photograph, but Curon deserves more than a photograph. Beneath the calm surface is a story about power, displacement and the stubbornness of memory — and above it stands the one part of the village that the water could not erase.