Se Desmonteghea 2026: Falcade Celebrates the Return from the Alpine Pastures

All summer they were up there. Since early June the herds of the Biois Valley have grazed the high pastures of the valley itself, of the Passo San Pellegrino and of Valles, while the tourist season ran its course down below. Then late September arrives: the days shorten, the grass loses its strength, the nights at altitude turn serious. For the animals and for the people who look after them, it is time to come home.

In Falcade that homecoming does not happen quietly. On the Saturday morning the main street fills with people, and the cowbells arrive from up the mountain: herds and flocks dressed in flowers, ribbons and mirrors, the decorated carts of each malga, the herders in traditional clothes. It is the moment when a whole valley watches itself work — and applauds.

It is called Se Desmonteghea, it runs in Falcade from 25 to 27 September 2026, and it has reached its twenty-second edition. This year, alongside the alpine pastures, it brings in a second great heritage of these valleys: the 2026 edition is dedicated to the Carnivals of the valleys.

What “Se Desmonteghea” actually means

The name of the festival is in Ladin, and it is literally a piece of reporting: se desmonteghea means “the coming down from the mountain” — the animals are being brought back down from the high pastures.

The verb belongs to a precise pair. Technical Italian has monticare (taking the livestock up to the summer pastures) and demonticare (bringing it back down at the end of the season); the dialect forms used across the Dolomite valleys are montegar and desmontegar, which give the noun desmontegada. The prefix des- does all the work: it cancels the upward movement. German has the same transparent pair, Almauftrieb and Almabtrieb.

One clarification is worth making, because the event is often billed as a “transhumance festival”: strictly speaking, transhumance is the broader idea, covering seasonal movements over long distances; summer pasturing — the vertical movement between valley floor and high grazing — is one particular form of it. What Falcade celebrates is precisely that second thing.

The Ladin name is not decoration. The Agordino valleys, together with Zoldo, Cortina, Cadore and Comelico, belong to the Ladin linguistic minority recognised by Italian law 482/1999, and the Biois Valley is one of the places where that identity is most actively cultivated — starting with the association that runs the festival.

What a desmontegada is (and why it is not a costume show)

Summer pasturing is a system, not a postcard. In late spring the animals go up to the malga — the alpine dairy farm; for three or four months they graze above 1,000 metres, where the grass is scarcer but far richer. That is why malga cheese and malga meat taste the way they do. Someone stays up there with them, the malgaro, milking twice a day, making cheese, mending fences, watching the weather.

At the end of September that cycle closes. The animals come down, the malga empties, the year is added up. The descent used to be simply the day the road filled again; if it had gone well — no animal lost, no accident up there — the herd was decorated out of gratitude and pride. That is where the flowers, the ribbons, the mirrors and the big bells come from.

Today the day has become a festival, and that is fine. But it is worth remembering that behind the flower crowns there are working farms doing this all year round, in conditions that are not picturesque at all. That is exactly the purpose the organisers give for creating Se Desmonteghea: to give value to a real asset of this territory, its farms and its malghe.

Saturday: Falcade waits for the herds

This is the heart of it. On the morning of Saturday 26 September the malghe come down and cross the old centre of Falcade: cattle, but also goats, sheep, donkeys and horses, decorated for the occasion, walking with their herders and the dressed carts of each farm. In the 2025 edition the crossing was scheduled for 11.00 am and involved the malghe of the Biois Valley, Passo San Pellegrino and Valles grazing district; the exact 2026 time will come with the programme.

Once the parade is over the animals are hosted on the Piana di Falcade, the wide grassy expanse in the middle of the village: that is where you can walk among them, talk to the people who breed them, and start telling one mountain breed from another. Then the festival moves to the marquee.

The village dresses up: a community festival first

The regional tourist board puts it plainly: this is “an event deeply felt by the people of the Biois Valley”, who spend that weekend decorating the village. You can see it on balconies, fences, fountains and shop windows. And above all you see it in how many local people wear traditional dress — not because the programme asks them to, but because it is their festival.

This is not set against tourism; visitors are welcome, and the event has grown partly thanks to them. It is a question of which comes first: the community here is not staging something for visitors, it is inviting them inside something it would do anyway.

The fair: more than 100 local stallholders

Around the Piana and the marquee runs the fiera delle tipicità, the local produce and craft fair, which the official page puts at more than 100 local exhibitors (the 2025 poster claimed over 120 stalls). Malga cheeses, cured meats, honey, small food producers, woodwork and wool: the kind of market where the producer is usually the person standing in front of you.

Under the marquee a full kitchen serves traditional dishes, and restaurants across the valley put on a dedicated Se Desmonteghea menu. For what will actually be on the plate it is worth waiting for the programme: in 2025, to give an idea, the evenings turned around a taiada de manz — sliced beef — with polenta, the traditional dishes of the Saturday lunch, and a whole bull on the spit on the Sunday.

Union Ladina Val Biois: the part that makes the difference

If Se Desmonteghea is not just another village fair, much of the credit belongs to who runs it. The Gruppo Folk Val Biois was founded in 1989, following the traces of an earlier group active from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, with a frankly modest aim: to have fun playing the popular music and dances handed down by the elders. Then it got serious. In 1996 the group launched the first Festival of the Folk Groups of the Agordino; in the mid-1990s it set up the Union Ladina Val Biois, which works with the Istituto Ladin de la Dolomites in Borca di Cadore and belongs to the Federation of the Ladins of Veneto.

That is where the part of the programme most village festivals lack comes from: the cultural talks and book presentations curated by the Union Ladina, and the book stand under the marquee with the association’s own publications. It is also why the festival, despite becoming the biggest end-of-summer event in the Agordino, has not lost the thread: its declared strength is the authenticity of the cultural values of the Val del Biois, passed on during the festival through moments of real depth.

On the count of editions the sources do not entirely agree: the folk group gives 2015 as the year it began running Se Desmonteghea — la festa delle malghe in its present form, while the official edition count starts further back — 2025 was the twenty-first, 2026 will be the twenty-second.

The folk groups of the Agordino

The other strong moment of the weekend is the folk group parade, which in recent editions has taken over the Sunday afternoon: costumes, brass bands, accordions and traditional dances through the old centre and across the Piana.

In 2025, for the folk group’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the visiting groups came from Comelico, Livinallongo del Col di Lana, Selva di Cadore, Rocca Pietore, San Tomaso Agordino, La Valle Agordina and the Conca agordina, accompanied by the Fodom band and the Accordion Alpe Adria ensemble, with guests from outside the region. It is a geography worth reading: in a single afternoon almost every Ladin and alpine community in the province walks past you. Who will be there in 2026 will be announced with the programme.

2026: Se Desmonteghea meets the Carnivals of the valleys

This is the announced novelty: 2026 is dedicated to the Carnivals of the valleys. On paper the pairing is odd — carnival belongs to February, the desmontegada to September — but culturally it makes a great deal of sense: these are the two rituals that mark the turn of the seasons in the Dolomite valleys, and in both of them the community tells its own story by putting something on.

The heritage being drawn on has nothing to do with parade floats. The Belluno Dolomites still keep archaic masquerades, with masks carved from wood and a precise symbolism, from the Agordino to Comelico and from Val di Zoldo to Cadore: the Mascorèda and the Matazìn of Sottoguda in Rocca Pietore, the Gnaga of Fornesighe in Val di Zoldo, the Santä Ploniä of Dosoledo in Comelico with the Zinghenesta, held to be the first female lead mask of any mountain carnival in Italy. We have written about what they mean in our piece on Carnival in the Dolomites.

Which carnivals will actually take part in Falcade has not been announced yet: we will update this section once the organisers publish the list.

Traditional dress: please do not call it a dirndl

One line on the official page says a lot: visitors are invited to wear traditional dress in order to live the spirit of the festival fully. It is not compulsory and it is not about dressing up: it is an invitation to take part rather than watch.

But something needs saying, because it is routinely got wrong: this is not Tyrol. The traditional dress of the Agordino is not a dirndl and not a Tyrolean costume. It is its own thing, documented and different from valley to valley, with its own vocabulary. In neighbouring Valle Agordina — the best-described example in the publications of the Belluno Pro Loco association — the woman’s outfit is made of camisa (a hemp linen shirt with puffed sleeves), carpeta (a wide woollen skirt), gucia and crosat (a fitted jacket and waistcoat), garmal (a woollen muslin apron), fazolet da col and fazolet da testa (shoulder and head scarves); the man’s of camisa, breeches, waistcoat, giacheta, cauzet (long socks), scarpet (soft slippers) and tabaro (a black cloak). The Biois Valley has its own variant, kept alive and taken on the road by the folk group: seeing it up close during the parade is one of the best reasons to be there.

If the subject appeals, there is more in our page on the popular traditions of the Dolomiti Bellunesi.

The Biois Valley, milk, and an Italian first

The Biois Valley opens at Cencenighe Agordino and climbs towards the Passo San Pellegrino through Vallada Agordina, Canale d’Agordo and Falcade, under the Pale di San Martino on one side and Focobon on the other. It is a valley of tabià — the wooden hay barns, more numerous here than anywhere else — of hay meadows and of malghe.

And above all it is a valley that owes milk a distinction: on 8 January 1872, in Canale d’Agordo, the archpriest don Antonio Della Lucia (1824-1906) set up what is considered the first cooperative dairy in Italy. Local farmers were suspicious and could not see the point of pooling their milk, so Della Lucia started making cheese himself in the presbytery to prove it worked. It did: by 1881 the province of Belluno had fifty-four cooperative dairies, and Belluno cheeses began to travel.

Holding those two facts together — the festival of the malghe, and the country’s first dairy cooperative, born in the same valley a century and a half apart — is the quickest way to understand why the Falcade desmontegada is not a historical re-enactment.

The words of the alpine pastures, carved into Dolomite place names

Readers following our series on the origin of Dolomite pass names have met this world already. Passo Staulanza, for instance, carries the stavoli in its name — the seasonal shelters for livestock: a whole landscape told by one word. Dolomite toponymy is full of these linguistic fossils, and we usually read them as traces of a vanished economy.

Se Desmonteghea is a reminder that it has not vanished. The same words that explain why a pass is called what it is describe, on the last weekend of September, something that actually happens: animals coming down, malghe closing, a valley counting its livestock. A fossil that walks.

The 2026 programme

At the time of writing, the detailed programme for the 2026 edition has not been published: the official sources give dates, place, theme and overall shape, but the times and individual events are still being finalised. We will update this section as soon as the organisers release the programme.

What is confirmed:

• Friday 25 September — the festival opens, given as 6.00 pm, at the marquee on Piazzale dello Sport
• Saturday 26 September — the herds cross the old village centre in the morning; in the afternoon the festival concentrates between the Piana and the marquee
• Sunday 27 September — the day of the folk groups, and the closing of the festival

Across all three days: the produce and craft fair with more than 100 stalls, traditional cooking under the marquee, cultural talks and book presentations by the Union Ladina Val Biois, music and traditional dancing, and dedicated menus in restaurants across the valley.

Why it is worth the trip

There is plenty to choose from in the Dolomites in late September. Se Desmonteghea offers something that is getting hard to find with this much naturalness: an entire valley that stops being a destination for three days and goes back to being a village, with its work, its language, its clothes and its animals in the middle of the road.

For anyone looking for the less crowded Dolomites, it is also one of the best moments of the year to get to know the Biois Valley — one of the finest and least trafficked of the places to see in the Dolomiti Bellunesi.

Cover image: the descent from the alpine pastures in the Dolomites, animals decorated for the occasion along the village street. Photo: Snazzo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 — stock image, not from Se Desmonteghea in Falcade.