Welcome to Pollino National Park - Landscape of the soul!

Close to activities of great interest such as shooting range, hiking, excursions in the Pollino National Park and rafting along the Lao River, it manages to attract many tourists who love nature and are passionate about river sports every year.

Een uniek podium waar het prachtige landschap van de natuur de toeschouwer betovert tussen adembenemende landschappen en majestueuze toppen. Hier domineren de heilige patriarchen, vasthoudende en stille herinnering aan een duizendjarige geschiedenis.

The Pollino National Park, with its 192,565 hectares of extension, is the largest newly established protected area in Italy. Straddling Calabria and Basilicata, the territory of the Park - which includes 56 municipalities - is characterized by several mountain massifs that make up the southern Apennines chain: the Pollino Massif, the Orsomarso mountains and Mount Alpi. Here, among very high peaks, Nature and Man intertwine millenary relationships that the Park, established in 1993, preserves and protects under its emblem: the Loricato Pine.

In 2015 the Park became part of the European and Global Network of Geoparks under the aegis of UNESCO which, in 2017 and 2021 respectively, included the Beech Forest of Cozzo Ferriero and the Beech Forest of Pollinello in the transnational Site of the "Ancient Primordial Beech Forests of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe", proclaiming them World Heritage Sites.

From the kasteel van Isabella Morra tot Valsinni, from the Madonna del Pollino and from the Serra di Crispo to the Monti di Orsomarso to the Valley of the Cedars, the ancient paths lead to a world of natural and cultural values ​​that satisfy man's desires and spirit with well-being and give him a make you feel better. You walk in the shade of the beech forests of the Bosco Magnano; climb to the timpa of San Lorenzo, to the cozzo del Pellegrino, the greenhouse of Ciavole and the Montea; you will glide over the waters of the Peschiera stream, the gorges of Raganello and Lao and the Abatemarco river; it is sheltered in the Argentino valley.
On the fields of Pollino and Novacco, among the meadows of great heights, the body catches its breath, rids itself of worries, looks at the horizon and restores the mind.
The infinity, the silence, the colors, the clear sky, the bright shine of the stars, in the night, in the dark, without other lights, everything envelops and gives pleasure.
The large park is magical; it is magic through the dolomite rocks, basalts, cliffs, caves, glacial cirques, moraine accumulations, loricate pine, symbol of the park, the pine-beech association, the golden eagle, the wolf, the roe deer and the otter.
The vastness of the area offers a thousand surprises; A thousand different images and views flow into the amazed soul, cadenced by the sounds and rhythms of natural environments.
It is a beautiful encounter between nature and man, a repetition of crops after crops, cultures after cultures, a succession of seasons and grafts, of migrations and yields, of hybridizations and contaminants to increase and enrich the biodiversity that the countries, places, fruits, seeds, grains, settlements have opened up and are becoming, diverse, but all anchored to the naturalness and identity and roots of the Park. It is history with paleontological finds, graffiti, remains from the past; with the remains of material culture, ethnic groups, linguistic islands belonging to minorities of Italo-Albanian origin; with the fumes from the chimneys of old country houses and small villages; with plants, orchids and wild peonies and wild flowers; with the places inhabited by man; With grazing herds and rural life, elsewhere increasingly oppressed and almost disappeared, pushed aside by modernity.

Air, water, earth, light, smells, tastes, sounds form a free and pure nature, where fear is extinguished.
The landscape has hardly changed for centuries; the cultivated fields still measure the fatigue of the inhabitants, farmers, shepherds and craftsmen; The spaces of everyday life are still shaped by ancient customs.
The countryside is dressed in new colors of the different seasons; the peace from the noise; refreshment in the cool breath of the wind that envelops mountains and valleys; Quench your thirst at springs of clear water with the taste of the rocks from which they flow and of nature that generated them.
The agricultural landscape is characterized by the spontaneous architecture of the old farm houses created to shelter from the cold winters and bleak summers, to welcome the children and their children's children in a patient succession of generations who wait with trepidation to enjoy each season of the fruits and the suggestions of individual climates. It emerges with the natural sculptures of oak trees challenging the sky, with the pear, the almond, the olive tree and, now, the many brambles, hedges, many brooms. It stands out in the sign of stone: the stone of the houses, of the dry stone walls of the country roads, of the boundaries of the plots.

In this world we live the memories of families with their group photos, in black and white, with the ceremonies of their weddings, with the rediscovered places of childhood, with the solemn moments of the processions, with the popular dances and the rhythms of bagpipes , with the costumes of the past; With sleepless nights at the bivouac waiting for the next day's religious rites in the cemetery of the churches in the mountains or in the forest for the annual celebrations of the tree cults.
Here everyone can feel a little like 'children of this nature', protected by its enormous and precious sample of endemics and biodiversity, between naturalness, rurality and typicality, between originality and authenticity.

It is the territory of the testimonies of ancient Lucania that connected with the isthmus road to the Tyrrhenian coast, from Cirella, to the archaeological remains of Sybaris on the Ionian Sea; an area where the railway line from Castrovillari to Laino and Castelluccio crossed through the "littorina" until a few decades ago announced the arrival in the districts of the Pollino of the civilization of machines.

Today, the old stations, the stone bridges and tunnels and the Calabrian-Lucanian railway line, completely disused after its abandonment and dismantling, show the charm built up over the decades, also of a unique and adventurous technological reinterpretation of the past. Here, the Pollino National Park preserves nature and people, ecologies and traditional local cultures.
Here the bond between land and human activities remains deep and unbreakable and the park preserves and protects it.