Lago Gardanella

The dive

Lago Gardanella is freshwater and man-made: a former quarry, spring-fed, inside the Gardanella Sport Village at Via Achille Grandi 46 in Peschiera Borromeo, on the eastern edge of Milan and about half an hour from the Duomo. It is not a lake you happen upon; it is a facility, and the dive is what the organisations based there have built into it.

What is in the water is deliberate. Submerged trees, their branches trimmed for safety, stand in the northern part of the lake as fish shelters and as something to swim through. There is a wreck, easy to explore and penetrable, with fish living inside it, and there are training platforms for skill exercises. On land the site carries cylinders and compressors, classrooms and meeting rooms, changing rooms, a wooden dock for kitting up and getting in and out, a moored inflatable, a small museum of historic diving equipment, a covered swimming pool for confined-water course work, a restaurant and plenty of free parking. For a Milan-area diver this is the Wednesday-evening and Saturday-morning site rather than a destination.

Water is around 20 C already in May and visibility is described as good by Italian lake standards, which is faint praise honestly given: it is not crystal clear. Fauna is carp, turtles, perch and zander. Reported sturgeon and catfish are not confirmed by any source we could find, so we do not list them.

Several organisations operate here rather than one: a Milan diving group runs the site as its home water, and at least two other diving associations list Gardanella Sport Village as their base. Which of them holds the concession is not published, and neither is the maximum depth, the entry fee, the membership requirement or the opening schedule. Those are the questions to ask by phone before you drive over, and we have left them blank rather than guess.

• Spring-fed former quarry inside a sports village half an hour from central Milan
• Penetrable wreck, training platforms and submerged trees with branches trimmed for safety
• Wooden dock, cylinders, compressors, classrooms and a covered pool for confined-water work
• Around 20 C already in May

Conditions

Still, spring-fed freshwater, no current. Around 20 C already in May. Visibility is described as good for an Italian lake, though not crystal clear. No source publishes a thermocline depth or a maximum depth.

On current: No current: this is a still quarry lake. Visibility is described as good for an Italian lake but not crystal clear. No source publishes a maximum depth for the lake, so none is recorded.

Life at Lago Gardanella

This is fresh water, so there is no reef life to log. We do not carry an occurrence record for inland sites: the scientific databases we use are marine, and the nearest records would come from whatever lake or river is in the search radius rather than from the water you dive.