Born from the sea: the "Pale Mountains"
Around 250 million years ago the Dolomites were a collection of shells, corals and algae submerged in a tropical sea. They emerged roughly 70 million years ago and were then carved by time and the elements: today they reveal, in a superbly exposed geology, a cross-section of marine life from the Triassic period. It is this extraordinary worldwide concentration of carbonate formations that makes the Dolomites a treasure for Earth Sciences.
The pale colour of the dolomite rock gives them the name “Pale Mountains”. At dawn and especially at sunset the rock blazes pink and fiery red: this is the enrosadira, the phenomenon that inspired legends such as that of King Laurin and his rose garden, linked to the Catinaccio massif.
The discovery of the Dolomites
Their story in the eyes of the world begins at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1789 the French naturalist Déodat de Dolomieu identified the distinctive mineral that makes them up, soon afterwards named “dolomite” in his honour by Nicolas de Saussure. In 1822 Leopold von Buch studied their stratigraphy, drawing the attention of his friend Alexander von Humboldt. It was the travel book The Dolomite Mountains by Gilbert and Churchill (1864), however, that introduced these mountains to the general public, extending the name from the mineral to the entire region.