Lake Garda Map: Every Pin Coloured by How You Get There

Most maps group places by type or by town. On Lake Garda the deciding question is not what a place is but how you reach it, because the railway stops at the south shore and the water crossing changes completely with the season. So the pins are coloured by access.

Blue pins are the towns themselves. Red pins are sights with a ticket: Sirmione castle, the Grottoes of Catullus, Malcesine castle, the Vittoriale, the Varone falls, the Limonaia del Castèl and the Roman villa in Desenzano, most of which close on Mondays or keep seasonal hours. Green pins are free outdoors: Punta San Vigilio, Strada della Forra, the Ponale path, Jamaica Beach, Lido delle Bionde, Brema beach, the Monte Baldo top station and Madonna della Corona.

Orange pins are parks and spas: Gardaland, Movieland, Parco Sigurtà and Terme di Sirmione. Dark teal pins are the arrival points, from the stations and airports to the car ferry and the Malcesine cable car. Before you plan around the red ones, check tickets.

The Wide South

The southern basin is low moraine country, hills of gravel and clay dumped by the retreating ice, and it is the only part of the lake with a railway. Desenzano and Peschiera del Garda sit on the Milan-Venice line, so nearly every train traveller arrives here. Sirmione lies on a long narrow peninsula reaching into the water from the south shore, its castle and Roman ruins at the far tip.

Gardaland sits just inland between Peschiera and Lazise, which makes the south the natural base for families with small children and for anyone without a car. Read more on Sirmione and Peschiera del Garda.

The Narrow North

North of the wide southern basin the lake narrows into a fjord squeezed between high mountains, and the water ends at the Trentino towns of Riva del Garda and Torbole. Arco sits a short way inland up the valley. No railway reaches any of these towns: the nearest station is Rovereto, and regular Trentino Trasporti buses cover the last stretch to Riva, Torbole and Arco.

This is the wind end of the lake, where the sailing and windsurfing schools cluster, and the walking country starts at the door. The shape matters for planning, because a boat ride from the south to Riva takes hours, while the drive from the south swings around the whole lake. See Riva del Garda and Torbole.

East and West

The east shore is Veneto: Lazise, Bardolino, Garda, Torri del Benaco, then Malcesine sitting under Monte Baldo, all linked by ATV buses from Verona. The west shore is Lombardy: Salò, Gardone Riviera with the Vittoriale, and Limone sul Garda near the north. Between them the boats do the crossing in season, and the Maderno-Torri car ferry links the two shores all year.

The lake surface sits at 65 m above sea level and the water is 346 m deep at its deepest point, and the shore keeps a mild, Mediterranean-type climate with olives and lemons at the foot of the Alps. Compare Malcesine and Limone sul Garda when choosing a side.

The summer passenger timetable ran from 16 May to 4 October, and its runs are the most honest ruler for this map. Desenzano to Sirmione takes 20 minutes by ordinary ferry. On the east shore a morning run leaves Peschiera at 8:00 and reaches Garda at 9:00, calling at Lazise at 8:28 and Bardolino at 8:45, one hour end to end with two stops.

Across the narrowing north, Malcesine to Limone takes 20 minutes and Malcesine to Riva 65 minutes. For the whole length, the ordinary boat from Peschiera to Riva takes close to 5 hours, stopping at everything on the way, while the fast boat does Desenzano to Riva in under 3 hours. Fast services cost the ordinary fare plus a zone supplement of $2.79 (€2.50) to $6.70 (€6), with no reductions.

The whole-lake day pass at $44.13 (€39.50) is the only pass that includes the fast boats, and a 3-day version costs $88.26 (€79). Fares run $1.68 (€1.50) to $19.55 (€17.50) one way by zone. Full times and lines are on the ferry page.

The table below gathers the key legs, so read each one as water time, not road time.

Isola del Garda

Isola del Garda sits off the west shore near Salò and is reached only by boat. The straightforward way in from the south is the private boat tour of Isola del Garda, which costs $496.04 per boat for a 1.5-hour circuit taking in Sirmione, the Rocca di Manerba and the Isola di San Biagio as well. A parking fee applies and is not included in the listed price, so budget for it separately if you drive to the departure point.

The tour is subject to good weather, and a cancelled departure is moved to an alternative date. Full visiting detail is on Isola del Garda.

The Monte Baldo Top Station

The summit pin above Malcesine sits at 1,760 m on Monte Baldo, and the only way up without a full day's hike is the cable car, which climbs from the lakefront in about twenty minutes. The adult return fare is $33.52 (€30) at the ticket office and $31.28 (€28) online, so buying online saves a little. Juniors born 2012 or later pay $20.11 (€18) return.

The ride shuts down completely from 2 November to 25 December for maintenance, and departures run only when the weather allows. Both official pages give different last-ride times, so check the day's timetable before planning a descent. The walking country above is on Monte Baldo.

The Ponale Path

The green pin on the west wall above Riva marks a path that began life as an engineering feat: a road begun in 1851, fortified by the Austro-Hungarians from 1860, and closed to traffic and handed to hikers in 2004. From Riva it runs 6.4 km with about 3 hours of walking and a highest point of 532 m, and the official listing calls it easy. The safety note is blunter: it is an alpine trail prone to rockfall, for experienced hikers.

Bus 214 picks up again at the Pregasina junction if you want to walk only one direction. The falls at the same end of the lake are on Cascata del Varone and the Ponale path.

Jamaica Beach

This green pin below the Grottoes of Catullus on the Sirmione peninsula has no road access at all. You reach it on foot, through the gate just before the Grottoes entrance and then down a steep dirt path through an olive grove. The surface is smooth white rocks rather than sand, part of the beach is free and part carries sun beds for hire, and there are free showers.

Dogs on a leash are allowed, and fires and camping are not. It is the sort of pin that looks close to everything on the map and takes real effort to arrive at, which is the point of colouring it green. More swimming spots are on Lake Garda beaches.

No Hotel or Restaurant Pins

A map that pinned whichever hotels or restaurants happened to be easiest to find would quietly become a ranking, and that is not what an access map is for. So no beds and no tables appear here. The bases are compared properly on where to stay, town by town, and the eating is handled on where to eat, with a separate page for restaurants in Sirmione.

Use the coloured pins to decide which shore suits your transport plan first, then pick the bed.

No Drive Times

No official source prints drive times between the towns on this lake, and inventing them would break the one rule this map keeps. So the distances here are given in boat minutes from the ferry operator's own summer timetable, which is measured, published, and the same for everyone. For scale, remember that the shoreline runs 158.40 km in total, and the road between the south-east corner and the north tip has to swing around the whole shape.

Where a drive estimate matters for your own plan, use a routing app on the day and treat every published figure here as water time.

Day Trips Off the Frame

Verona, Venice, Mantua and the Dolomites all sit beyond the edge of this map, and they stay off it on purpose, because dragging them in would blur the lake shape that the pins are there to show. The practical routes and times are gathered on day trips from Lake Garda. If you want the easy version, the Verona coach day at $73 runs 8-10 hours with round-trip transfers from spots including Limone, Lazise and Riva del Garda, and the Dolomites coach day at $95 covers Pordoi Pass and Ortisei with hotel pickup.

Beaches Beyond Sirmione

Only beaches described by an official tourism source are pinned here, which is why the green swimming pins cluster so heavily around Sirmione: its own tourism office lists seven beaches by name, including Jamaica Beach, Lido delle Bionde and Brema. The Trentino board lists 17 beaches in its area, so the north has swimmable pins too. Other stretches of shore certainly exist, but without an official description they stay off the map, and you should not read their absence as a verdict on the water.

The full rundown is on Lake Garda beaches.

Every boat minute on this page comes from the summer timetable, and from 2 November to 12 March those minutes stop meaning anything: no passenger boats run anywhere on the lake. The only service left is the Maderno-Torri car ferry, a 30-minute crossing whose winter timetable starts at 8:10 from Maderno and 8:45 from Torri, with the last runs at 18:00 and 18:40. It does not run on 25 December, and its one-way fare is $16.65 (€14.90) for a car up to 4.50 m with the driver included, $8.38 (€7.50) per adult passenger.

The Monte Baldo cable car closes from 2 November to 25 December, so its teal pin goes dark for the same stretch. The red ticketed sights keep their own rhythm: Sirmione castle and the Grottoes of Catullus close on Mondays all year, and Malcesine castle drops to weekends in the cold months. Winter changes the map's meaning, and the lake in winter sets out what still works.