Fabbriche di Careggine: The Italian village that only pops up every few decades

Fabbriche di Careggine is something like the Italian Atlantis.

Decades ago, the village, which once had hundreds of residents, sank under the floods of a reservoir. But that’s not the only special feature. Because every now and then Fabbriche di Careggine reappears. Next year it should be the first time in almost 30 years! The whole story.

The village of Fabbriche di Careggine is located in the province of Lucca in Tuscany, about an hour and a half north of Pisa. Its history goes back a long way: as early as the 13th century, blacksmiths who extracted iron from the nearby mountain of Monte Tambura settled in the town. In the 17th century Fabbriche di Careggine even became one of the most important iron production sites in Italy and in the early 1900s the town also traded in marble, according to the website of the neighboring municipality of Vagli di Sotto.

But just 40 years later, the residents had to leave their homeland and move to Vagli di Sotto. Because with the construction of a gigantic dam with a height of 96 meters, the whole of Fabbriche di Careggine went under in the floods of Lago di Vagli, today the largest reservoir in Tuscany.

The emergence of the village became an attraction

But Fabbriche di Careggine is not lost forever. It has reappeared four times since the village fell in 1953. There is a simple reason for this: when the reservoir is being maintained, the workers drain the water. Then the medieval ruins, including the church of San Teodoro, built in 1590, become visible again.

So far, the water has been drained in 1958, 1974, 1983 and most recently in 1994. At that time, the appearance of the village became an attraction, in 1994, according to the Italian magazine “Dove”, a million people visited it. Initially the plan seemed to be to service the reservoir once a decade, but it has now been almost 30 years since Fabbriche di Careggine was last visible. Next year it should finally be that time again!

According to the Italian travel portal “Si viaggia”, the former mayor of the municipality of Careggine announced in mid-February that the ghost village would emerge from the floods again in 2023. The dam was originally supposed to be emptied again last year, but according to the report, this plan was postponed due to the corona pandemic and technical reasons.