Lake Como Kitesurf Guide - Local Knowledge From 414

Como Winds

414 Como Kitesurf Guide. Como is ideal for kiting because of the consistent thermal winds that provide great conditions from April through to October. Lake Como experiences four major winds that all have some influence on conditions:

Breva
Blowing out of the South when the Tivano (below) weakens. It’s the main wind on Lake Como, especially in the North where it is quite strong, blowing from about 10am to sunset, and accelerated by the funelling effect (“venturi”) of the mountains in the North. This is the predominant wind regime in summer.

Tivano
Blows the whole year from 6-10am out of NE. It’s originates in the “Veltlin” or the “Chiavenna Valley” and if it’s missing, it means that the weather will be bad. For advanced kiters, this wind can be good for early morning sessions in Val Madrera. See the Como Spot Guide for more info. The north wind especially appears when there are bad weather conditions in the north towards St Moritz in Switzerland.

Ventone
Blowing from the North, often after a thunderstorm in the mountains with gusts up to 40-60km/h. Not recommended for kiting, other than in the southern part of the lake if it is stable.

Menaggino
Comes from the South with strong gusts, mainly after thunderstorms in summer.

Como Wind Forecast

A lot of kiting and wind sport enthusiasts use Windguru and Windfinder to check conditions before their trips. These websites are great at predicting the wind in the vast majority of places, but they simply don’t work for Como! The reason for this is that they model their forecasts on larger-scale pressure systems and don’t pick up the smaller-scale thermal regimes or (importantly) the influence of the local topography in accelerating the wind at the north end of the lake (known as the ‘venturi’ effect).

We use a combination of a few local weather forecasts to predict the wind on the lake. Il Meteo & Meteolive both predict the direction of wind quite well (although they also don’t pick up the venturi acceleration so understate the wind strength), and for a more general picture of the weather, we use the NZZ forecast for the south of Switzerland. If you want to find out the latest conditions, just give us a call!

Como Kitesurf Spot Guide

At 414 Kiting we run all of our kitesurf lessons from the middle of the lake (usually launching from south of Bellano and working back towards Gera Lario), to take advantage of the Southern ‘Breva’ wind and to give pupils as much space as possible to practice. For more advanced kitesurfers there are numerous possibilities to set up & launch from land and ride the super-smooth Breva wind.

(Click on the pins for individual spot info)