The Mühlental of Campill

After stowing my heavy rucksack in the car and freshening up following the circular hike to the Schlüterhütte and the impressive sunrise over the Geisler Peaks, I visited the mills in the Mühlental, which are well worth seeing. Today, they serve as a museum and can occasionally be viewed from the inside, where you can watch a grinding mechanism in operation. Outside, you can still see the wooden pipes that carry the water from the stream on stilts to drive the water wheels.

At the entrance to the lowest mill, an elderly gentleman is sitting on a bench in the sun. As the “museum warden”, he unlocks the mill for visitors. I strike up a conversation with him and he tells me stories from his long life in Campill.

In Ladin, Campill is called Lungiarü and is located in the heartland of the so-called Ladins. The Ladins are an ethnic group or linguistic community defined by their belonging to the Dolomite Ladin language group. The Val Badia is considered the heart of the Ladin settlement and cultural area, where the Ladin way of life and language have remained very much alive. Ladinia also extends to the Val di Fassa, Val Gardena, Val Fodom and around Cortina D’Ampezzo. The town signs are therefore trilingual and many of the place names have Ladin origins, e.g. Sas for rock or Val di Morins for the Mühlental.

All in all, it was an eventful day. Now I wanted to use the remaining hours of sunshine to prepare the roof tent for the night at my pitch at the Sitting Bull riding stable and cook a cosy dinner. As soon as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, it turned chilly and I retreated into my sleeping bag to go to bed early. The next morning, the hike to the panoramic summit of the Zwölferkofel was planned.

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