Cilento is one of the main attractive tourist areas of Campania.
Its uncontaminated coastline offers to the visitors beautiful beaches, bays hidden in the Mediterranean maquis, Aleppo pines and juniper trees, rocky cliffs, caves and wonderful cliffs. Marine protected areas of Punta Licosa and Costa Infreschi witnesses the purity of these waters and the biological and geological uniqueness. Moving towards the inward areas, however, the landscape is mostly hilly and mountainous with a series of great natural environments. The National Park of Cilento and Vallo di Diano was established in 1991; due to its extension it is the second larger Italian park and represents without doubt one of the most important biogeographic reality of the southern Italy.
Area of high biodiversity, within it there are more than two thousand of different species of native wild plants, whose 10% is defined as endemic or rare and several habitats that conserve the wildlife elsewhere extincted. A reality where plants and animals coexist in a protected area of 181,000 hectares.
For sports lovers, the Park is an open-air gym. Trekking paths, with trails of 1300 km, or horseback riding or cycling. During the summer you can enjoy various water sports such as sailing and underwater spearfishing. In many harbours of the Cilento coast, it could be possible to become fisherman for a day. Along the Calore river, located in Felitto, it is also possible to feel the emotion of canyoning and rafting.
But Cilento is not just nature: it is a crossroad of civilizations and cultures, the Greek and the Roman ones, the Nordic, the African or the Arab conquerors. As consequence, a lot of battles have been fought, but everything eventually has found its balance, a great complexity, rich in memories and history. Just between history and culture a number of interesting itineraries unfolds in the National Park of Cilento. Each country, in fact, contains a proper popular culture and peculiar features.
Among the many art venues in the Park, the three main cultural attractions of national and international are: Velia, home of the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno; Paestum, ancient city of Magna Graecia, the Carthusian monastery of San Lorenzo in Padula.
The Park and the archaeological sites of Paestum and Velia have been included in the list of UNESCO world heritage. The Park has been considered unique in Italy, as natural and cultural Mixed Site and also has received a prestigious award: the introduction in the exclusive program MAN (Man and Biosphere) as a “Biosphere Reserve”, in order to ensure conservation of this valuable biogeographic system.
Come and visit us! You will have many possibilities in a perfect combination of natural and cultural tourism in a land of incomparable beauty in which biological and cultural diversity have joined forces to create something unique and indispensable.