Festival at the Cattedrale Vegetale: «Sentieri di natura e sapori»

The local press listings and the Pro Loco booklet describe the same afternoon in slightly different words: «pruning demonstration, music concert and Alpine aperitif» for the Pro Loco, pruning, band concert and «food tour with tasting» for La Voce delle Valli, which also gave the times. The sources do not say which band played.

Two weeks later, on Sunday 5 July at 5 pm, the Cattedrale hosted another event of the summer programme: a concert organised by the Gruppo Missionario di Zambla.

The Cattedrale Vegetale was commissioned by the Orobie Park with the municipalities of Oltre il Colle, Ardesio and Roncobello and built in 2010 to a design by the Lodi artist Giuliano Mauri, who died in 2009: 42 beech trees planted inside columns of woven wood, meant to rot and leave the trees standing. Storm Vaia, in October 2018, destroyed much of the scaffolding and some trees; in summer 2023 33 beeches were left and the new municipal administration announced it had cleaned up the area and intended to replace the missing ones.

In June 2026 Valbrembanaweb wrote that, after some years of maintenance, the Cattedrale has started growing again, although the soil is not the most fertile for beeches. The pruning demonstration showed exactly this work: the columns were made to disappear, and now it is the trees that have to be guided.

The Cattedrale stands at Grumello, at about 1,345 metres, along the road that climbs from Plassa, above Zambla Alta, towards Pizzo Arera. You leave the car in the Plassa car parks, because you cannot stop along the road; from there you walk up the tarmac for two hairpin bends, about 500 metres and a quarter of an hour, and a short path leads to the artwork. As the crow flies the Plassa car park is about 400 metres away.

The road that continues from Plassa up to the Alpe Arera at 1,600 metres reopened to traffic on 22 April 2026: up there parking costs 4 euros for any vehicle, with the ticket to be bought before driving up in the participating shops or at the Plassa parking meters. On foot you can also come from Zorzone, on path H33 shown on the signpost next to the Cattedrale.

The Cattedrale is halfway between Zambla Alta and the Alpe Arera. With the car at the 1,600-metre car park, the Cà d'Arera hut is five minutes away and the Capanna 2000 about an hour's walk; from the Capanna starts the Sentiero dei Fiori, the botanical loop among the species that grow only on these mountains. According to the page on the endemic flora, flowering on the Arera and the Alben runs from April to August, and in June Saxifraga vandellii flowers on the rocks.