Lake Como in Italy is one of the main places for wind and water sports in this country: windsurfing, yachting, and even more.
If you go to Italy to do one of these sports, you don’t need to look elsewhere. In my opinion, Lake Como is one big outdoor spot that has almost every sport both in summer, and winter.
In this guide, you will learn about the five main outdoor activities on the lake — windsurfing and kitesurfing, sailing, hiking, skiing, and paragliding — as well as when it’s best to go here, how to get there faster and easier, and where to live while doing your favorite sports.
Outdoor writer from the Dolomites, Italy, and Karelia, Finland
— Lake Como is one of Italy’s three major lakes on par with Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore. They are all within a few hours drive or a train ride from each other in the region of Lombardy with the capital city of Milan in the Northwest Italy, from where the lakes are also not far away.
Como is the third largest, but the deepest of the three lakes, up to 400 meters. It also has a very unusual shape in the form of an inverted “Y” letter or human feet in motion. The other two lakes are also not very wide but very long and surrounded by mountains up to about 2,000 meter that rise right off the shoreline. There are no large coastal towns or long sandy beaches on Lake Como, it is not Tarifa.
All three lakes are of glacial origin, that is, they were formed by a melting glacier that once covered all of Northern Europe. That’s why they have such an unusual shape. By the way, many other lakes in the world were formed in a similar way — for example, the Great Lakes in the United States near Chicago.
Lake Como is one of the centers of tourism in the region of Lombardy and in Italy in general. At the same time, it is also a center for outdoor activities. Let’s talk about it further…
Read next my outdoor guide to Lake Como in Italy in the Windy.app Blog — leading pro weather forecast app for wind sports and outdoors.
Text: Ivan Kuznetsov
Cover photo: Malgorzata Bujalska Unsplash
