Riserva naturale controllata Sorgenti del Pescara

At Popoli, the Pescara rises in a lake fed by underground springs. The surrounding reserve protects a landscape of clear water, reed beds and limestone slopes.

Why it matters

Established by regional law 57 of 31 October 1986, the regional reserve lies entirely within Popoli Terme and protects roughly fifty hectares plus an eighty-six-hectare protection belt. The water itself is the spectacle: countless large and small polle feed a clear lake with a combined discharge of about 7,000 litres per second, water that seeps into the limestone of Campo Imperatore and the Sirente-Velino massifs, then resurfaces where impermeable ground forces it up. A few kilometres downstream it meets the Aterno and the Aterno-Pescara is born. Dense reed beds ring the water, and the arid limestone hillock of Capo Pescara adds a counter-habitat — which makes the reserve an important wetland habitat.

What to notice

Underwater meadows of water-crowfoot and other aquatic plants grow in the clear spring water. Riverine woodland, reed beds and Mediterranean scrub support a varied wetland habitat, associated with herons, kingfishers, cormorants, ducks and grebes. The reserve also protects freshwater fish and other aquatic species.

Context and history

The springs were a communal haunt long before they were a reserve: early twentieth-century photographs on the reserve's history page show locals fishing for crayfish and trout from boats and washing laundry among the reeds, and the banks were cultivated with hemp — the crop whose memory gives the Canapine trail its name. The railway arrived first; the landscape was altered in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a provincial road and the Pescara–Rome motorway along the site's edge. Protection reversed the damage: asphalt was removed and the site renaturalised, giving the springs a new role as a protected natural landscape.