Parco Nazionale Isola di Pantelleria

Sicily's first national park protects most of volcanic Pantelleria, an island that lies closer to Africa than to Sicily. Its 6,560 hectares hold Montagna Grande's 836-metre summit, the thermal lake known as the Specchio di Venere, dry-stone dammusi and zibibbo vines bent low against the wind.

Why it matters

Pantelleria is not a Mediterranean island with a park on it; the park and the island are largely the same thing. Established in 2016 as the first national park in Sicily, the Parco Nazionale Isola di Pantelleria covers about 6,560 hectares, roughly eighty percent of an island whose landscapes were shaped entirely by volcanism: lava flows, fumaroles, volcanic lakes and hot springs. Because no other national park existed in Sicily before it, its creation extended Italy's protected-area system to the Sicily Channel, to a black rock of calderas and crater cones midway between Europe and Africa.

The park also protects a working cultural landscape. Zibibbo vines trained as low bushes on terraces built of dry stone earned a place on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014, and in 2018 the island's dry-stone landscape entered Italy's national register of historic rural landscapes. Capers, olives and passito wine still grow inside the protected area, so a walk here passes through agriculture as much as wilderness.

What to notice

Start with the heights. Montagna Grande, at 836 metres the highest point of Pantelleria, rises as a remnant of the island's main caldera, and around it stand the kúddie — smaller crater cones such as Kúddia Mída, Kúddia Attalóra and Kúddia Randázzo that formed after the caldera collapsed. Monte Gibéle reaches 700 metres nearby. From these heights the island reads as a geography textbook: valley floors, crater rims and terraced slopes, with the park's office describing Montagna Grande as a sentinel in the middle of the Sicily Channel.

Then go to the water. The lake the park calls Lago Bagno dell'Acqua, known island-wide as the Specchio di Venere, fills a crater hollow barely above sea level, fed by hot springs that run between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius alongside rainfall. Its shores are biologically extraordinary: cyanobacteria have built stromatolite structures, two African sedges find their only European station here, and the Pantelleria statice and the mole cricket Gryllotalpa cossyrensis are point endemics found nowhere else. Along the coasts, look for the favare — jets of steam that can reach around 100 degrees — and for mofete, the quiet gas vents of the island's secondary volcanism.

Context and history

The island is volcanic through and through, and the lava tells the timescale: the Khaggiár flow near the lake dates back some 8,000 years, the Gelfisér formation about 18,000. Pantelleria's most recent eruption is within living memory of written records. Earthquakes began shaking the island's southeastern contrade on 24 and 25 May 1890, and surveyors later estimated that the northeastern coast had risen by roughly 75 centimetres. On 17 October 1891, around half past eleven in the morning, the sea about four kilometres northwest of the port began to boil, throwing up steam, loud detonations and rafts of spongy black magma blocks. The astronomer and geophysicist Annibale Riccò, who travelled to the island to study the submarine eruption, published his account that November; the park devotes a section of its site to this documented event, the island's last.

Formal protection came much later. The park authority, the Ente Parco Nazionale dell'Isola di Pantelleria, was established in 2016, making the park the first of its kind in the Sicily region. Its remit deliberately spans both nature and the rural landscape: the authority's site gives equal weight to volcanism, geosites, flora and fauna on one side, and to agriculture, terracing, the dammusi with their white dome roofs, the giardini panteschi that shelter citrus trees, and the UNESCO-listed alberello vine system on the other.