Cogne
Discover Cogne
A concise introduction to Cogne, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Cogne sits at 1,534 metres in a side valley south of the Aosta Valley, with roughly fourteen hundred inhabitants, at the northern edge of the Gran Paradiso massif.
The Gran Paradiso National Park, established in 1922 and the first in Italy, surrounds the village; it was created from a Savoy royal hunting reserve to save the Alpine ibex, which had been reduced to a few hundred animals.
In front of the village lies the Prato di Sant'Orso, a flat glacial meadow a kilometre long, kept open and grazed, with the Valnontey and the glaciers beyond it.
The Lillaz waterfalls are a short walk away, and in winter the frozen falls make this one of the principal ice-climbing venues in Europe.
Cogne was an iron-mining village for centuries; the mines at Colonna closed in 1979 and can now be visited.
The village is also known for dentelles au fuseau, a bobbin-lace tradition several centuries old.