Parco regionale di Porto Selvaggio e Palude del Capitano

On Nardò's Ionian coast, the regional park of Porto Selvaggio and Palude del Capitano pairs a steep pinewood with rocky coves, karst wetlands and caves frequented by some of the earliest modern humans known in Europe.

Why it matters

Porto Selvaggio is the wild hinge of the Salento's Ionian shore: roughly seven kilometres of high limestone coast where the land drops to clear water in coves rather than sand, held in place by a pine forest planted by hand barely seventy years ago. The municipality records that the park was protected in 1980 to safeguard 424 hectares, including 230 hectares of pinewood planted by the State Forestry Corps in the early 1950s. The protected area was later enlarged into a regional park. Within its boundaries sit three Sites of Community Importance — Torre Uluzzo, Torre Inserraglio and the Palude del Capitano wetland — and a cave whose archaeology changed the story of human colonisation in Europe. Few parks anywhere pack prehistory, military architecture, botany and swimming into so short a coastline.

What to notice

The park's steep limestone coast is broken into small coves. The pinewood, planted by the State Forestry Corps in the early 1950s, contrasts with the low Mediterranean scrub towards the cliffs. At the Palude del Capitano, the wetland that gives the park half its name, the ground is pocked with flooded sinkholes known in Salento as spunnulate — dolines filled with brackish water, a karst peculiarity the municipality describes as the heart of the site's botanical interest. Coastal towers mark the ridge at Torre dell'Alto, Torre Uluzzo and Torre Inserraglio. Baia di Uluzzo contains the Grotta del Cavallo, the prehistoric cave that makes the park a reference point for European prehistory.

Context and history

The park's protection was a hard-won local victory. The coastline had been degraded by quarrying and grazing when the State Forestry Corps began its reforestation campaign in the early 1950s, planting the first pines across some hundred hectares of the Nardò shore. The municipality records the park's protection in 1980 over 424 hectares. The area was later enlarged to include the coast and the Palude del Capitano wetland. The Italian environmental association FAI counted it among its "100 places to save" in 2007, a measure of how contested this shore remained within living memory. The deepest layer, though, is prehistoric: in the Grotta del Cavallo, excavated from the 1960s, two children's teeth from the Uluzzian layers were re-analysed in a study published in Nature in 2011 and identified as certainly modern human, not Neanderthal, dated to between 45,000 and 43,000 years ago — evidence that the Uluzzian culture of southern Italy may represent the earliest known modern humans in Europe. The cave lies within Baia di Uluzzo.