The Feast of the Rock Giants

In the Lepontine Alps, where the land rises steeply toward the sky, Italian engineering of the 1930s launched one of its boldest challenges in the mountains. At 1,600 meters in the Ossola Valley, construction began on the Agaro Dam. This was not merely an effort to tame water, but a project to redefine the boundaries of energy production through a gravity-fed hydroelectric dam of monumental scale.

The construction site was carved out of solid rock by an army of giants, armed with courage, dedication, and pride. A monumental undertaking was shared among 500 to 800 workers: stonemasons hand-cut and shaped stone blocks for the dam’s facing; miners blasted through the mountain to advance the diversion tunnels; while carpenters, furnace operators, skilled technicians, and, not least, the canteen staff all played their part.

At the end of the day, these giants gathered around an immense communal table before the basin was flooded to create the new artificial lake. “To us!”

Facts & Figures

Construction altitude: Approximately 1,600 meters above sea level, in the heart of the Ossola Valley.

Dimensions: A monumental gravity dam standing 60 meters high and 240 meters long.

Reservoir: An artificial basin capable of holding up to 20 million cubic meters of water.

Workforce: A peak of over 800 workers active on site at the same time, operating in round-the-clock shifts over more than three years of intense activity.

The art of stonework: Thousands of blocks of local stone were entirely hand-cut and shaped by skilled craftsmen and stonemasons to clad the concrete colossus.