Val Colla (valley)

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The Val Colla
Colla TI : village and church

The Val Colla is a valley in the Swiss canton of Ticino .

geography

The Val Colla Land includes the source and upper catchment area of ​​the Cassarate with an area of ​​4300 hectares. The summit of Gazzirola is the highest point in the valley at 2116 meters; the cassarate rises at its foot. On the southern ridge of the mountain lies the San Lucio pass (1541 m above sea level), which leads from Val Colla into the adjacent Val Rezzo ( province of Como ). The valley is surrounded by the peaks of the Cima di Fojorina (1810 m above sea level) and the Cima dell'Oress (1727 m above sea level) in the south and the Monte Bar (1816 m above sea level) in the northwest.

The mountain slopes are mostly willow or with birch , chestnut and hornbeam , especially in the lower part of the valley. In the higher regions dominated by larches - and fir forests at the upper end of the valley (. Of about 1000 to 1200 m above sea level), the latter largely the result of plantations.

population

In Val Colla there are more than a dozen scattered villages such as Colla , Certara , Bogno , Cimadera Curtina, Cozzo, Piandera, Scareglia, Signôra. The valley has about 900 inhabitants. Workers mainly commute to Lugano . A bit of agriculture is still practiced in the valley, and tourism has become one of the main livelihoods. Politically, most of the Val Colla has belonged to the Quarian Val Colla of the city of Lugano since April 13, 2013 .

Language and culture

The Lombard dialect of Ticino is predominantly spoken throughout the valley ; The official language is Italian.

The valley's plumbers had once developed their own secret language , the Rügín (in the nearby Val Cavargna they say Rungín ), based on the local dialect, but with coded terms and therefore completely incomprehensible to outsiders (example: rebáiza «Polenta»). In the past, plumbing was the main activity of the inhabitants of the valley, as well as that of the neighboring Val Cavargna.

Forest fires 1973

On the afternoon of December 4, 1973, for unknown reasons, a fire broke out near the village of Bogno along the flanks of Mount Gazzirola. On the night of December 4th to 5th, favored by strong winds, this united with a second fire near Cozzo, which began on the evening of day 4. The fire then spread on the right flank of the Val Colla and was extinguished on December 7th. It was one of the biggest fires in the canton of Ticino, with a burned area of ​​around 2000 hectares of forest (almost exclusively coniferous wood ) and pastures. A total of around 250 hectares of plantings were destroyed, the result of eighty years of forestry work.

literature

  • Maurizio Cattaneo, Alberto Gandolla: Valcolla. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  • Gabriele Corti: Brucia il bosco. La storia del Monte Ferraro e della Valcolla. Pubblicazioni USTAT - DSS 2005–1.
  • Oskar Keller: The secret language of the wandering tinkerers in Val Colla, Ticino. In: Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen 1934, 7th year, 1st issue, pp. 55–81.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Oskar Keller: The secret language of the wandering tinkerers of the Val Colla, Ticino. In: Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen 1934, 7th year, 1st issue, pp. 55–81.

Coordinates: 46 ° 4 '48 "  N , 9 ° 2' 24"  E ; CH1903:  723873  /  104428