Lago di Braies is a small emerald lake in the Dolomites of South Tyrol, in northern Italy, with the sheer grey wall of the Seekofel dropping 2,810 metres straight into its far shore and an old wooden boathouse on the near one, from which painted rowing boats go out across the water. That boathouse is the picture: a dark timber shed on the northern bank, boats moored in a row beneath it, and behind it the whole cliff standing upside down in the lake on a windless morning. You hire one of the boats and pull out to the middle, where the water is clear to the stones and the colour shifts from green to turquoise with the depth. The lake is not glacial; a rockfall from the mountain dammed the valley and the stream filled the basin behind it, which is why it sits so abruptly under the wall.
The shore loop is level the whole way, about three and a half kilometres, from the boathouse along the western bank under the larches, across the scree at the foot of the Seekofel and back along the far side with the boathouse growing smaller across the water. For a single narrow week in early October the larch woods on the slopes above turn deep gold before the needles fall, and their colour doubles in the lake; a week early and they are still green, a week late and the branches are bare. In January and February the lake freezes hard enough to walk on, and when the ice is officially declared safe people cross it under the snow-dusted wall. In Ladin legend the wall of the Seekofel is the door to Fanes, a lost mountain kingdom, and once every hundred years, under a full moon, its exiled princess rows silently across the lake. The boathouse has become one of the most photographed spots in the Alps, and in summer the road up is closed to cars for much of the day, so that the boats, the wall and the water are still what you find when you get there.