Piazza Colombo is rich in history. On this site was built the Montana Hotel in 1902 by Issaco Georgetti: Trail's earliest Italian immigrant.
In 1990 the hotel burned to the ground, and the land stayed vacant until 2007.
Piazza Colombo was created by the hands of volunteers. Their goal was to reclaim and restore the site and to create a public space to commemorate the community’s Italian population.
The project won the Best Land Reclamation Award, presented by The Butchart Gardens, in 2009.
The park offers picnic tables, a fountain, and beautiful flower beds, and there is even part of the old basement that also has been restored. We plan to return and enjoy a picnic lunch, and enjoy all that this park has to offer.
Piazza Colombo is nestled in the centre of
The Gulch, an area along Rossland Avenue in West Trail which has been settled by a predominantly Italian community of immigrants. Being in a narrow valley, the name was a natural.
As the number of Italian residents in the Gulch grew, stores were established selling Italian goods, hotels were built offering social contact, clubs and lodges were formed and a church built enabling these Italian residents to celebrate their heritage. The gulch offered the Italian immigrants the opportunity to preserve their language and culture and the area became a microcosm of the "Old Country".
The Gulch, officially known as Rossland Avenue, was first settled by squatters in the late 1890s. In the early 1900s a small group of Italian immigrants, attracted to Trail by the prospect of work in the smelter or with the CPR, bought homes and established businesses in this narrow valley. They formed the nucleus of what was to become a large Italian community and an important commercial and cultural part of Trail.
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