Monte Fossa delle Felci

The green roof of the Aeolian Islands, Mount Fossa delle Felci crowns Salina with an extinct crater wrapped in chestnut woods and ferns. A climb through the regional reserve trades beach time for silence, raptors overhead and views across an archipelago born of fire.

Why it matters

Salina owes its greenness to this mountain. Fossa delle Felci and its neighbour Monte dei Porri are the two extinct volcanoes whose twin silhouettes give the island its unmistakable profile and still orient every traveller who lands here. The regional tourism portal Visit Sicily notes that the island's volcanoes have been dormant for around 13,000 years; woodland now covers the extinct crater at the summit. The summit area falls within the Riserva Naturale Orientata Le Montagne delle Felci e dei Porri, established by regional decree in 1984 across the three communes of Salina, and the wider archipelago has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2000 under criterion (viii), cited as a classic reference in the history of volcanology. This is the archipelago's volcanism at its calmest: an extinct crater wrapped in woodland.

What to notice

The mountain explains its own name as you walk: the regional biodiversity observatory records that the felci — the ferns — grow ever more numerous and larger as you near the crater. Below them, the slopes carry evergreen Mediterranean scrub and woods of chestnut, oak, pine, holm oak and tree heather; the reserve's official sheet describes the Fossa delle Felci face as the more hospitable and richer in vegetation, while the Monte dei Porri side stays wilder. Watch for the dormouse, an unexpected presence on a small volcanic island, and for Eleonora's falcon, which the same sheet calls the naturalistic symbol of the island, hunting over the slopes in late summer. Shearwaters and passing migrants form part of the wider island’s birdlife.

Context and history

Salina's landscape is the product of six volcanoes, of which the national tourism portal Italia.it names the extinct craters of Fossa delle Felci and Monte dei Porri as the most legible. Their soil, not their fire, made the island prosperous: the vines for Malvasia and the capers sold around the world grow on the slopes this reserve shelters, and the regional observatory calls Salina the most fertile of the Aeolian islands. Formal protection came with Regional Administrative Decree 87/44 of 14 March 1984, which created the oriented reserve over 1,521.06 hectares in the communes of Leni, Malfa and Santa Marina Salina, to conserve the natural vegetation and restore Mediterranean forest. The site now anchors the Natura 2000 area ITA030028 and sits inside the wider Aeolian UNESCO designation, and management belongs to the Città Metropolitana di Messina.