The Secret Paths of Lake Como: Walks You Won't Find in Any Guidebook

The best paths on Lake Como are the ones that do not appear on tourist maps.

They are older than the maps themselves — stone-laid mule tracks that connected mountain villages before roads were built, forest paths worn smooth by centuries of woodcutters and charcoal makers, ridge walks that follow the contours of the mountains with a logic that is geological rather than recreational. They are unsigned, or signed only with the faded red-and-white blazes of the Club Alpino Italiano. They pass through forests that feel ancient because they are ancient. They arrive at viewpoints that no bus or boat tour will ever reach. And they begin, many of them, within walking distance of Hotel Paradiso Como in Brunate.

The ridge walk to San Maurizio

From the hotel, a path leads north along the ridge above the lake. Within ten minutes, you have left Brunate's villas behind and entered a landscape of open meadow and scattered pine. The path follows the ridgeline — the lake visible on your left, the valley of Torno on your right — with a grade gentle enough for conversation and a view wide enough to end it.

After forty minutes, you reach the church of San Maurizio, a small stone building on a promontory that offers a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama of extraordinary scope. The lake below. The Alps to the north. The Pianura Padana to the south, stretching toward Milan on clear days. The bell tower of Como's Duomo, tiny and precise, directly below. You are alone. The church is usually locked. The meadow around it is yours, and the silence, and the view. This walk is not in any Lake Como guidebook.

The descent to Torno through the chestnut forest

On the eastern side of the ridge, a path descends through dense chestnut forest toward the village of Torno on the lake's eastern shore. The path is steep in places, paved with the original stone that was laid centuries ago, shaded by a canopy that keeps the air cool even in high summer. The chestnuts are enormous — some of them older than any building on the lake — and their twisted trunks and spreading branches create a forest architecture that feels deliberately designed, though it is simply the result of centuries of growth.

Torno, when you reach it, is a revelation. A fishing village on the eastern shore that tourism has overlooked — narrow alleys, a Romanesque church, a waterfront piazza where old men drink coffee and the ferry to Como arrives twice an hour. You can take the ferry back to Como and the funicular back to Brunate, completing a loop that shows you three entirely different faces of the lake: the mountain above, the forest between, and the water below.

The path to Monte Piatto

For those who want more altitude, the path from Brunate to Monte Piatto climbs through mixed forest to a summit at 1,132 metres. The walk takes approximately ninety minutes and passes through landscapes that change with elevation — chestnuts giving way to beech, beech giving way to open meadow with scattered pine. At the top, you are above everything. The lake is far below, both arms visible — the branch toward Lecco and the branch toward Menaggio — and the mountains of Switzerland mark the northern horizon.

There is a rifugio at Monte Piatto, open in summer, serving polenta and grilled sausage and wine from the valleys. You eat outside, at a wooden table, looking at a view that no restaurant on the lakefront can match because no restaurant on the lakefront is a thousand metres above the water.

Returning to Paradiso

Every walk from Hotel Paradiso Como ends with the same reward: the return. The funicular, if you have descended to the lakeside. The path through the chestnut forest, if you have stayed on the ridge. And then the hotel — thirteen rooms, the terrace, the view from this side, the heated pool at 34 degrees waiting to receive muscles that have been working, the sauna to complete the warmth, and MamaGina's kitchen preparing dinner.

The bread will be fresh, as it always is, baked that morning in the hotel's kitchen. The pasta will be homemade, as it always is. The cakes will be warm, as they always are. You will eat at a table by the window, the lake below you now dark and reflecting the shore lights, your legs tired in the satisfying way that comes from having walked a path that only the mountain knows, and you will feel something that luxury hotels spend millions trying to manufacture and that Hotel Paradiso Como produces naturally: the sense of being in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right food and the right view and the right silence. It costs nothing extra. It has been here since 1969.

Walking & Wellness: 3 nights at Hotel Paradiso Como with daily breakfast, guided mountain walk, and pool & sauna recovery. Book direct on hotelparadisocomo.com.