Pastry craze overwhelms Italian Alpine refuge as influencers fuel overtourism

At 2,300 metres above sea level, where the Dolomites rise in jagged peaks and the air thins to something almost sacred, a small mountain refuge has become the unlikely epicentre of a tourism crisis. The Friedrich August hut, nestled between Col Rodella and Passo Sella in Val di Fassa, was built to serve climbers and hikers seeking shelter and sustenance in the high country. For three decades, it baked krapfen—a traditional German pastry, somewhere between a doughnut and a cream-filled dream—without incident. Then the internet found it.

Food bloggers began posting videos of these pastries, golden and dusted with sugar, framed against the cathedral-like backdrop of the Dolomites. The pastries cost four euros each. The videos cost nothing to share. What followed was a pilgrimage of a different kind: hundreds of people ascending the narrow mountain path, some waking before dawn, others camping overnight in the thin air, all of them determined to buy a krapfen before supplies ran out. The queues became so dense, so visible in photographs and videos, that they attracted even more people. The crowds fed the algorithm. The algorithm fed the crowds.

One visitor told a news crew they had come for nothing else. Another said they had been drawn by an Instagram post paired with what they described as heavenly music. A staff member at the refuge, speaking anonymously, expressed something between bewilderment and exhaustion. The hut had been making these pastries for thirty years without fuss. Now it was chaos. "We don't like it," the worker said, a sentence that carries the weight of an entire community's frustration.

But the real problem, according to the leaders of Italy's mountain communities, is not pastries. It is not even tourism itself. It is the way algorithms work—the way they identify a beautiful place, amplify it, concentrate human attention on it like a lens focusing sunlight. Marco Bussone, president of Uncem, the national union of mountain communities, was direct: "The mountains are not a playground." Francesco Abbruscato, who leads the Veneto branch of the Italian Alpine Club, went deeper. Until five or six years ago, he said, the Dolomites did not suffer from overtourism in specific locations at specific times. Now there are places where the beauty itself has become invisible, buried under dozens of people taking selfies, present only for the image they will carry away.

Abbruscato named the real wound: visitors who come to the mountains without knowing them or respecting them. The mountains have always drawn people. But there is a difference between a hiker who arrives with intention, who understands the landscape and moves through it with care, and a person who arrives because an algorithm suggested it, stays long enough for a photograph, and leaves. The first builds a relationship with a place. The second consumes it. The krapfen crisis is not about pastries. It is about what happens when the internet turns a refuge into a destination, when beauty becomes content, when a mountain hut becomes a set.