The Villages of Lake Como's Eastern Shore: A Day Trip from Hotel Paradiso Como

The western shore of Lake Como has the fame. The eastern shore has the soul.

Bellagio, Tremezzo, Menaggio, Varenna — these are the villages that appear in the guidebooks, on the postcards, in the social media feeds that have turned Lake Como into one of the most photographed landscapes in Europe. They are beautiful. They are also, in the months between May and September, busy in a way that transforms beauty into a queue.

The eastern shore is different. The villages here — Torno, Nesso, Careno, Pognana Lario — are smaller, steeper, less accessible, and virtually unknown to international tourism. They cling to the cliffs above the water with the particular stubbornness of places that were built before roads and have never quite adjusted to their existence. They have narrow alleys instead of promenades, fishing boats instead of tour boats, and a relationship to the lake that is practical rather than picturesque.

From Hotel Paradiso Como in Brunate, the eastern shore is remarkably close. A descent by funicular to Como, a ferry or a short drive along the lakeside road, and you are in a version of Lake Como that feels like a different century.

Torno: the village time preserved

Torno is the first village south of Como on the eastern shore, twenty minutes by ferry from the city. It is small — fewer than 1,200 inhabitants — and constructed vertically, its houses stacked up the hillside from a waterfront piazza that still functions as the village's living room. Men drink coffee at the bar. Children play by the harbour wall. The Romanesque church of San Giovanni, parts of which date to the twelfth century, stands at the water's edge with the calm authority of a building that has seen everything.

Torno was once famous — in the Renaissance, it rivalled Como in wealth and influence, and traces of that prosperity survive in the ornate doorways and faded frescoes of its oldest buildings. Today, it is famous for nothing, which is its greatest asset. You can walk its alleys for an hour without meeting another tourist. You can sit at the waterfront and watch the ferry come and go and feel the particular peace of a place that is beautiful without trying to be visited.

Nesso: the waterfall between two bridges

Nesso, half an hour further south along the shore, possesses what may be Lake Como's most extraordinary natural feature: the Orrido di Nesso, a waterfall that drops through a narrow gorge between two medieval bridges before reaching the lake. The gorge is dramatic — a cleft in the rock face through which water has been carving its path for millennia — and the combination of falling water, ancient stone, and the dark blue lake below is the kind of scene that would attract thousands of visitors if it were on the western shore but which, here on the east, remains a discovery.

The village itself is a cascade of stone houses descending to a harbour that still shelters traditional fishing boats. The path from the upper village to the waterfront is a series of steep staircases, passages through covered alleys, and sudden openings to views of the lake that appear without warning and disappear behind the next wall. It is a walk that rewards curiosity and punishes haste.

Careno and the quiet north

Further north, the eastern shore becomes wilder. Careno is a cluster of stone houses on a steep cliff, accessible by boat or by a path that descends from the road above with the directness of a statement that does not require elaboration. The village has a church, a small harbour, a single bar, and a silence that is not empty but full — full of the sound of water lapping against stone, of the wind in the olive trees that somehow grow on these steep slopes, of the bells that ring the hours with a regularity that the village's human population has long since ceased to match.

From Careno, looking south, the lake stretches toward Como, and you can see Brunate on the mountain above — the villas, the funicular track, and somewhere up there, invisible from this distance but precisely located in your memory, the terrace of Hotel Paradiso Como where you had breakfast this morning.

The return to altitude

The day ends as it began: with the funicular. You board in Como, carrying the memory of stone villages and narrow alleys and a waterfall between two bridges, and in seven minutes you are back at 700 metres, back in Brunate, back at Hotel Paradiso Como where the heated pool is waiting at 34 degrees and the terrace faces the sunset and MamaGina's kitchen has been preparing dinner since the afternoon.

The bread will be fresh — baked this morning, as always, homemade, as always. The pasta will have been rolled by hand. The cakes will be warm. You will eat at a table by the window, looking down at the lake where you spent the day, and the villages you visited will be visible as points of light on the dark shore — Torno, Nesso, Careno — tiny and glowing and quiet, the eastern shore's secrets kept safe by distance and darkness.

Lake Como's eastern shore is not undiscovered. It is simply unvisited — overlooked by the tourism that concentrates on the western villages and the central headlands. From Hotel Paradiso Como, it is close, it is easy to reach, and it shows you a Lake Como that the postcards have not yet found. The Cattaneo family, who have been watching this lake from Brunate for fifty-seven years, have always known it was there. Now you do too.

Lake Explorer: 3 nights at Hotel Paradiso Como with breakfast at MamaGina, a day trip to the eastern shore, and sunset on the terrace. Book direct on hotelparadisocomo.com.