Image from Italy shared as that of a road in Himachal Pradesh

Context

An image showing an aerial view of five tunnelled roads along a hilly slope has been shared on Facebook to claim it shows a scenic road in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. The picture has been shared with the caption, “Beautiful Himachal Pradesh Road View,” and has received over 400 likes. The archive of the post can be found here.

In Fact

On running a reverse search on the image, we found several older posts claiming it to show the San Boldo Pass in Italy. We searched for photos of the mountain pass and found the exact picture used in a post on Alamy, a stock image website. The image was captioned as “Passo San Boldo, Cison di Valmarino, Treviso Province, Veneto, Italy” and credited to photographer Mark Robertz. Another photo of the San Boldo Pass is available on the stock photo website iStock with the caption “San Boldo pass / Paso san Boldo is one of the most interesting pass road in the world. This is a one way pass road. There are five tunnels into the rocks with 5 hairpin turns or loops.” The image, taken from an angle similar to the photo in question, was attributed to ‘gehringj’. 

We could also geolocate the mountain pass in Italy on Google Earth. The Google Earth results and the image of the multiple tunnels match. We also accessed user photos from Google Street View and were able to confirm that the image being shared as that of a road in Himachal Pradesh is from Italy. 

The San Boldo Pass is a small mountain pass in Veneto, Italy, connecting the towns of Trichiana and Tovena in the Cison di Valmarino region. There are five tunnels blasted into the rock with loops and six bridges.

The Verdict

The image shows the San Boldo Pass in Italy and not a road in Himachal Pradesh.