Loading...
CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — In the main square of this town high in the Italian Alps that will host many of the Winter Olympic Games this month, there stands a sculpture of an elegant lady clutching a Dior handbag and skis. In keeping with this place that has long catered to the world's wealthy and famous, she is translucent, as if carved from ice. But curious visitors who touch her soon realize: She is plastic.
The statue is a fitting metaphor for the increasingly elaborate measures being taken to preserve a wintry reality that is disappearing. As climate change brings warmer weather, the snow that once blanketed Cortina comes less often. Ski lifts whir up mountainsides of bare rock and brown grass, but for the white strips of artificial snow on the pistes.
In Italy's bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and in the Dolomites — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — organizers made a bold pledge to be sustainable and use the Games to "showcase the importance of protecting sensitive mountain ecosystems." But as the opening ceremony approaches, environmentalists tell a different story. They describe a landscape now scarred by the felling of old-growth forests to make way for new infrastructure, and Alpine rivers depleted to feed snow cannons. And they say the dozens of construction projects approved for the Games are urbanizing a mountain environment already stressed by overtourism.
"Cortina is known as Queen of the Dolomites. But we should rename her the 'Queen of Cement,'" says 70-year-old Luigi Casanova, director of a local environmental group, Mountain Wilderness, surveying the small town where more than 20 cranes dot the landscape.
He's standing beside a new bobsled track that snakes its way down the mountainside through the remains of an ancient forest and butts up against the town. Hundreds of larch trees were chopped down to make space for it.
"These are trees that survived two world wars," says Casanova, who has spent a lifetime walking these mountains. "Soldiers who fought here had the sensitivity to conserve this extraordinary heritage. But they couldn't survive the vandals of 2025."
The day the men with the chainsaws arrived, Casanova was at this site with famous Italian cellist Mario Brunello, who has long advocated for protecting nature in the Dolomites.
"It was a dramatic and extraordinary contrast: The melody of the cello — him sitting there on a stool, playing those pieces — while just 10 or 15 meters behind him, there was the crashing sound of those larches falling," Casanova says.
The International Olympic Committee had wanted to hold the bobsled events in Innsbruck, Austria, where there is already a world-class track. But Matteo Salvini, Italy's deputy prime minister and transport and infrastructure minister, rejected the suggestion and made holding the sporting event in Italy a point of national pride.
"The Games must be Italian games," Salvini wrote on X in February 2024. He accused environmentalists of trying to "sabotage" the Olympics and of betraying Italy "in front of the whole world."
Environmental organizations have stood their ground. Eight associations, including the Italian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), made a joint statement that they found "no evidence to certify the environmental sustainability" of the projects for the Winter Olympics, which was promised in the candidacy dossier in 2019.
380 Olympic pools of water — for snow
It is estimated that the Games will need 84.8 million cubic feet of water, or the equivalent of 380 Olympic swimming pools, for snowmaking alone. This is drawn from Alpine rivers and streams, says Fabio Tullio, an environmental activist and member of Open Olympics 2026, a watchdog group made up of environmental associations.
He drives NPR to a spot at the edge of Cortina, where the Boite River flows down through the Dolomite Mountains. The once-pristine landscape is a building site, with trees cut down and left on the side, along with earth dug out. A generator growls nearby, muffling the river's burble, and filling the alpine air with the stench of diesel. Tullio shows us the black plastic pipe from which water is sucked out of the river and pumped up the slopes to make snow. Official statements say this draws 25 gallons per second.
In-depth studies to fully understand the impact of this and other infrastructure on the region's ecology and biodiversity have not been done. In fact, publicly available documents show that no full environmental assessment was conducted for over 60 per cent of the some 98 projects approved for the Games.
"This is the great omission and the biggest concern," Tullio says. "That ultimately there could be a negative legacy for this region."
Simico, the governmental company responsible for Olympic infrastructure, didn't respond to NPR regarding the challenges to the claim of sustainability.
The Winter Olympics in Italy does use mostly existing sporting venues. Nonetheless, these Games bring a lot of new construction to this rural land, as projects are approved under funding proposals for the Olympics. Simico has said it believes the infrastructure being built — much of which won't be ready until years after the Games are finished — such as roads and car parks, will be useful for residents.
But at a local cafe built in the traditional alpine style with wood walls, Roberta Zanna, the head of the opposition party in Cortina d'Ampezzo's local council, says many residents don't want this "development." They worry it will further damage their environment and urbanize rural alpine life. "And then we will really lose our identity," she says.
Already in the Dolomites, thousands of tourists regularly crowd at spots made famous by influencers on social media. Once quiet spots visited by hikers have been overwhelmed by people arriving by car to take selfies. Cortina's mayor has said that Lake Sorapis, a brilliant turquoise lake surrounded by jagged peaks, can see crowds of over 2,000 people visit in a single day in the high season.
When Cortina d'Ampezzo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1956, it had a positive effect on the town, Zanna says. Athletes and onlookers arrived mostly by train on tracks that have long since gone. Back then, there was no need to build new car parks or cover prairies in tarmac for new roads. The new sports facilities and ski lifts helped strengthen the local economy. The snow fell entirely from the sky, and "one of the ice skating events was organised on one of our frozen lakes," says Zanna. "It was a time when we could think about growing the town."
But with the opportunities for skiing in Cortina melting away due to rising temperatures from climate change, and the mountain ecosystems already under stress from tourism, Zanna says now is not the time for more construction, more artificial snow, more luxury hotels, and more tourism that these Winter Olympics promise to bring.
Copyright 2026 NPR
