Gera Lario

Up here the Breva blows, the wind that runs up the lake from south to north, and Gera Lario, with its marina and lido, is one of the lake's places for sailing, windsurfing and kitesurfing. On the shore, less than a kilometre from the village, lie two of the lake's official bathing points, Pontile and Spiaggia Acquaforte, and the class of their water is assigned at the end of each season from the official sampling.

The village is also a starting point for walking and cycling: the cycle and footpath follows the shore to Domaso on one side and runs along the Mera towards Sorico on the other, and the paths lead into the Pian di Spagna nature reserve too. At the harbour entrance the votive lighthouse of 1957 recalls the 1951 flood.

San Vincenzo stands beside the stream at the end of an avenue of cypresses: a Romanesque church built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the site of a Roman villa and rebuilt in the fifteenth, with a presbytery frescoed in 1546 and a polyptych of 1547. The easy Via Regina di Vercana loop starts here, nine and a half kilometres between the shore, Domaso and the old stretches of the road towards Trezzone.

The village belonged to the Tre Pievi with Gravedona, Dongo and Sorico and served as a base for the Spanish troops in the wars against the Grisons. On the square stands the church of Nostra Signora di Fatima, built between 1614 and 1634 and restored after the 1951 flood; above the village, from San Bartolomeo, the Alta Via del Lario and the climb to Monte Berlinghera begin.

A Roman necropolis has been found at Sant'Agata. In a farmhouse in the village an architrave came to light with a dedication to Jupiter carved by the Aneuniates, a people of the upper lake; it is kept in the Museo archeologico Paolo Giovio in Como. The Via Regina, the road that climbed from Como to Chiavenna and the Alpine passes, ran through Gera.

In the Middle Ages San Vincenzo, first recorded in 1176, depended on the pieve, whose seat was first at Olonio and then at Sorico. In 1482 the comune of Gera asked for the church to be separated from Sorico, and at the end of the sixteenth century San Vincenzo became a parish. In 1807, under Napoleon, Gera absorbed the municipalities of Sorico, Montemezzo and Trezzone, but the Restoration undid the union. In 1929 the comune took the name Gera Lario. On 8 August 1951 a flow of mud and boulders came down the San Vincenzo stream and swept through the village.

Both of the village's churches were decorated partly with money from those who worked on the lake. In 1546 and 1547 Gera's Società dei Naviganti, its boatmen's society, had the chancel of San Vincenzo frescoed. The frescoes are attributed to the workshops of Ambrogio Arcimboldi and Sigismondo De Magistris, the altar polyptych to Arcimboldi and his workshop.

The church on the square is tied to the lake as well: the fishermen paid for part of the chancel paintings, finished in 1725, and since 1962, the year it was reconsecrated, the church has been the Santuario dei Pescatori, the fishermen's sanctuary. The village celebrates its patron saint, Vincent, on 22 January.