Parking at the Dolomite lakes: five lakes, five different rules

The mistake almost everyone makes: Misurina

A great many guides write that you need a booking to visit Lake Misurina. You do not, and the confusion comes from mixing up two roads that start in the same place.

Lake Misurina is freely reached, with nothing to book. You only pay for parking, from 15 May to 31 October, between 8 and 20 including holidays: two euros an hour, not pro rata, or fourteen for the whole day, in the two lakeside car parks, in via Guide Alpine and at Loita. Campervans have a serviced area at three euros an hour or twenty a day, with a forty-eight hour maximum.

The compulsory booking applies to something else: the toll road that climbs from Prati di Rimbianco to the Auronzo hut, that is the access to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. Another road, another rate and another ticket, valid twelve hours from the time you choose. We wrote about it in the guide on reaching the Tre Cime.

Anyone who confuses the two either books something they do not need, or turns up at the Tre Cime barrier without the booking they do need.

Braies: the strictest system, and the ticket that is half a voucher

Lake Braies has the tightest regime in the Dolomites. From 1 July to 15 September 2026, between 9 and 16, you enter the valley only by public transport, on foot, by bike, or with an online booking. Outside those hours and that period you go in and pay for parking on the spot.

The combined ticket costs 44 euros for cars and motorbikes and 49 for campervans over 2.20 metres. It includes the transit permit, guaranteed parking and the shuttle if needed. It also includes a 22 euro voucher to spend in the valley's restaurants and shops, for those who book in advance: the real cost of transit is therefore about half the advertised price. A toll disguised as spending, or the reverse, depending how you look at it.

Enforcement is automatic, with barriers and plate recognition. You need the registration number when booking, and plates authorised the year before carry over automatically.

There is a trap the official leaflet repeats in three languages and almost nobody passes on: on line 442 from Dobbiaco to the lake, the Mobilcard and the Südtirol Guest Pass are only valid from 16 September. In the regulated period they do not count, and anyone arriving expecting public transport to be included in their guest card pays anyway. In those weeks the bus also has to be booked online and paid in advance.

• Regulated 1 July to 15 September 2026, from 9 to 16
• Combined ticket 44 euros car, 49 campervan, with a 22 euro voucher
• Barriers and plate recognition, booking tied to your registration
• Bus 442 from Dobbiaco, 28 minutes, but Mobilcard and Guest Pass only count from 16 September
• Blue badge holders: access always allowed

The Braies car parks one by one: P1, P2, P3, P4

Everyone tells you the access rule. Almost nobody tells you which car park to pick. There are four at Braies, numbered P1 to P4, and the gap between the nearest and the furthest is a hundred metres against five and a half kilometres, and thirty euros against seven. The distances and rates below come from the leaflet of the Prags valley tourist board, marked "as of 10/2026", read on 7 October 2026. The leaflet itself warns they are indicative maximums that vary with the season and the time of day.

P4 is the lakeside car park: a hundred metres and you are on the shore. It is also the dearest, up to 30 euros for 24 hours or 15 euros for three; a motorbike pays 15 for 24 hours or 5 for three. It is the only one that takes campervans, 45 euros for 24 hours, but there are ten or fifteen spaces and they fill early: anyone who misses out has to look outside the Braies valley. Coaches from ten seats up pay 60 euros for 24 hours. The free disabled spaces are here, and so are the toilets by the Hotel Lago di Braies, which you pay for.

P3 is three hundred metres away and costs a third less: up to 18 euros a day or 14 euros for three hours, a motorbike 10 a day. It too has a limited number of reserved disabled spaces. It is the sensible compromise when P4 is full and you would rather not walk.

P2 is eight hundred metres away and costs a third of P4: up to 10 euros a day or 7 euros for three hours, the same for a motorbike. It is also the best equipped of the three: three disabled spaces, charging points for electric cars and free public toilets, which at the lake you pay for. Twenty euros saved and a free toilet for eight hundred metres of walking is a good deal. The official sources do not agree on the walking times: the Braies tourist board says "about 2 and 5 minutes" for P3 and P2, which is a brisk pace for three hundred and eight hundred metres, so we give the leaflet's distances instead.

P1 is something else. It sits five and a half kilometres from the lake, down the valley, it opens only in the summer months and it costs 7 euros for a car, 3 for a motorbike, 15 for a campervan. It is not a lakeside car park: it is the shuttle car park, and it is the one you book ahead when the valley is regulated or on busy late-season days. If you see "P1" on a booking form, that is what you are booking, not a space by the water.

• P4, 100 m from the lake: car up to 30 €/24h or 15 €/3h, campervan 45 €/24h (10-15 spaces), coach 60 €/24h
• P3, 300 m: car up to 18 €/day or 14 €/3h, motorbike 10 €/day
• P2, 800 m: car up to 10 €/day or 7 €/3h, charging points and free toilets
• P1, 5.5 km, summer only: car 7 €, motorbike 3 €, campervan 15 €, with the shuttle
• Disabled spaces at all three lakeside car parks, free and few at P4, three at P2

At Braies the right car park depends on the hour you arrive

From 1 July to 15 September, between 9 and 16, there is no choice to make: you enter the valley only by public transport, on foot, by bike or with the online booking, and the booking is the 44 euro combined ticket, which covers transit for the whole day, a guaranteed space and the 22 euro voucher. The voucher only comes with an advance booking, not with one made on the day.

Before 9, in that same period, you drive in and pay on the spot. But the tourist board's site puts it in capitals: arriving before 9 is allowed and does not guarantee you a space, because the car parks may already be full or already reserved. The rates leaflet says the same in its own words: in high season, 1 July to 15 September, spaces before 9 are "strictly limited" and booking is recommended.

After 16, and outside the regulated period, you drive in freely and pay at the barrier. That is the slot where the logic reverses: the lake is emptying, P4 frees up, and a three-hour rate is enough.

From 16 September there are no traffic restrictions in the Braies valley at all, apart from the toll road to Prato Piazza, and no booking is needed. Between 16 and 30 September you can still book P1 with the shuttle in advance on certain days listed on the site, and on that same date, 16 September, the Mobilcard and the Guest Pass become valid again on bus 442.

Carezza: no booking, but the parking costs

Lake Carezza is half an hour from Bolzano and as busy as Braies, but the regime is the opposite: no booking, no closed hours, you arrive when you like. The official page states outright that the car park cannot be booked in advance.

What there is instead is a car park with a barrier, run by the municipality of Nova Levante, on the main road opposite the lake: 270 car spaces and 4 for coaches, open all year round the clock, unattended. Rates checked on 26 August 2026 run from 5 euros up to one hour to 30 euros for the whole day, with the most used band, up to six hours, at 13 euros.

From the car park you reach the lake through the visitor centre and an underpass, two minutes, step free, with four disabled spaces and free toilets. Line 180 from Bolzano stops right at the car park.

One note on the rates: several sites still quote prices less than half these. We give the ones on the municipality's official page. And the lake is a protected natural monument: swimming, drones and crossing the fences are all forbidden, as we set out in the index of lakes.

Dobbiaco: the new rule that covers five municipalities

Lake Dobbiaco is freely reached, five minutes from the centre towards Cortina, and you pay for parking. From June 2026, though, the system changed, and it is a change that affects a whole stretch of the Alta Pusteria.

The annual pass now covers every paid car park in the participating municipalities, that is Monguelfo-Tesido, Villabassa, Dobbiaco, San Candido and Sesto, with a two hour maximum and a parking disc displayed. Lake Dobbiaco, however, is one of the few car parks where the pass allows all day parking.

Here we stop, because the hourly rate for the lake car park is not published by the municipality. Two incompatible versions circulate, differing by a factor of two, and neither comes from an official source. We are not printing it.

Line 445 from Dobbiaco station stops at the car park, and it is the simplest answer for anyone who would rather not deal with any of this.

Sorapis: the gap

Lake Sorapis is the most fragile of the five, because you only reach it on foot from the Tre Croci Pass and the lake sits high up in a delicate setting. It is also the only one for which we could find no published rule at all.

As far as we could verify, there is no page from the municipality of Cortina, the tourist board or the park describing the parking regime at the Tre Croci Pass. Everything you read, about the car park being free, its capacity, what time it fills, comes from blogs and portals. So we are not repeating it.

What is verified is the bus: Dolomitibus line 51 from Cortina stops at the Tre Croci Pass, from 8 June to 9 September 2026, nine services a day every day, twenty-three minutes from Cortina. It is also the better practical answer, given the car park at the pass is small and the climb to the lake takes hours.

The Ampezzo Dolomites Nature Park, run by the Regole d'Ampezzo, has published access measures for 2026, but they concern another valley: the road to Malga Ra Stua, closed from 6 July to 6 September with a shuttle from Fiames. The Tre Croci Pass is not mentioned.

Five lakes, five philosophies, no coordination

Lined up, these five regimes say something nobody states out loud: access regulation in the Dolomites does not follow tourist pressure, it follows whoever had the political will to write it down.

Braies has a motorway-grade system with barriers, cameras and named bookings. Carezza, equally busy and easier to reach, has a ticket machine. Misurina applies ordinary seasonal pay and display. Dobbiaco has just built an agreement between five municipalities. Sorapis, the most delicate of them all, appears to have nothing.

This is not a judgement on the merits: it is that a visitor moving twenty kilometres finds a different world with nothing to warn them. It is the same reason swimming rules change from lake to lake, and why we started keeping them in an archive with the date of the check: the method is on the data page.