Riserva Naturale Regionale Orientata Salina e Dune di Torre Colimena

West of Torre Colimena, a former salt pan fills and dries with the seasons, its brackish shallows attracting flamingos and wading birds. Around it lie juniper dunes and salt-tolerant steppes within a protected coastal landscape.

Why it matters

The Salina e Dune di Torre Colimena have been protected since 2002 within the regional reserves of the eastern Taranto coastline. The coastal reserve system covers roughly 1,100 hectares. Priority habitats, including the seasonal lagoon and dune vegetation, support herons, egrets, black-winged stilts and flamingos. The basin once produced salt for communities in the hinterland.

What to notice

• The Salina Vecchia, also known as Salina dei Monaci, changes with the seasons. In summer it can dry to a salt crust, while flooded margins support salicornia vegetation.
• The dune belt between lagoon and sea supports large-fruited and Phoenician juniper, myrtle, lentisk, phillyrea, holm oak and the endemic sea-lavender Limonium japigicum.
• Dense scrub of the Calicotomo-Myrtetum type includes spiny broom, cistus, lentisk, myrtle and phillyrea, with perennial orchids in clearings.
• The lagoon attracts flamingos, herons, egrets and black-winged stilts.
• The sixteenth-century Torre Colimena was built to guard the coast against pirate raids.

Context and history

The shallow depression behind the dunes was an economic engine long before it was a sanctuary for birds. Local tradition credits Benedictine monks of the Middle Ages with extracting and trading salt here; written records are more solid from the eighteenth century — the first documented harvest falls in 1731, and by 1732 the basin had taken the shape of a collecting pan. Salt was gathered twice a year and was contested between neighbouring communities; an 1874 resolution of the Avetrana town council authorised a private operator to work an arm of the pans toward Sava. The nineteenth-century reclamation laws that drained so many malarial marshes never reached this basin, and the light intervention of the 1940s and 1950s left its wild character in place.

The tower at the water's edge belongs to the coastal warning system thrown up in the sixteenth century against corsair landings. As for the name Colimena, no etymology is settled: Greek derivations circulate, and the tale of a sea nymph of that name is a modern invention rather than ancient myth.