Nebrodi Regional Park

Nebrodi Regional Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Nebrodi are the green mountains of north-eastern Sicily, a long range between the Tyrrhenian coast and the northern foot of Etna, protected as a regional park, and they are the part of the island that foreign visitors least expect: beech forests, mountain lakes, grazing cattle and free-ranging black pigs, a landscape closer to the Apennines than to the Sicily of temples and lemon groves. They lie an hour and a half to two hours from Catania, Messina, Cefalù or Taormina, by slow, winding roads, and although there is no fee and no gate, the distances and the lack of public transport and signposting mean that most visitors are best served by a local guide with a vehicle.

The 4×4 tours from the small town of Cesarò, on the southern edge, are the usual formula: a half-day or a full day on forest tracks closed to ordinary cars, up to the lakes of Maulazzo and Biviere, to the viewpoints facing Etna, and to a farm or a shepherd's hut for a tasting of the park's produce, provola cheese, ricotta, and above all the cured ham and salami of the suino nero dei Nebrodi, the native black pig. Horseback treks to Lake Maulazzo follow the old transhumance paths, on the sturdy local Sanfratellano horses, and buggy safaris from Cefalù range across the Nebrodi and the neighbouring Madonie. Walkers with a car can drive to the Portella Femmina Morta pass, on the road from Cesarò to San Fratello, and follow a broad, easy track to Lake Maulazzo in an hour and on to the Biviere in three. The visitor centres are at Cesarò, Alcara Li Fusi and Caronia.

Visiting Nebrodi Regional Park: what you will see

The regional park was established in 1993 and is the largest protected area in Sicily, covering some 860 square kilometres in twenty-four municipalities of the provinces of Messina, Catania and Enna. The range forms, with the Peloritani to the east and the Madonie to the west, the Sicilian Apennines, and its rounded sandstone and clay ridges, quite unlike the limestone crags of the Madonie, rise to Monte Soro, 1,847 metres; the Arabs, it is said, called them an island within the island. They carry about half of all the forest left in Sicily: cork oak and holm oak on the lower, seaward slopes, then Turkey oak, and from about 1,200 metres the southernmost large beech forests in Europe, with holly, yew, maples and, at the Tassita wood, an ancient grove of yews. The name comes from the Greek nebros, a fawn, for the deer that once abounded.

In the clay hollows of the ridge lie a number of small lakes, rare in Sicily: Maulazzo, an artificial pond of the 1980s set among beeches below Monte Soro, and the Biviere di Cesarò, a natural lake of about eighteen hectares at 1,278 metres, a resting place for migrating water birds, whose surface turns red in summer with the bloom of a microscopic alga, and which on a clear day holds the reflection of Etna. At Alcara Li Fusi, the pale limestone cliffs of the Rocche del Crasto tower over the village, and here the griffon vulture, exterminated in Sicily by poisoned baits in the 1960s, was reintroduced from 1998 and now breeds in a colony of a hundred or more, with golden eagles, lanner falcons and Egyptian vultures nearby. The Catafurco waterfall near Galati Mamertino, thirty metres into a rock pool, is a favourite short walk. Wildcats, porcupines, martens, dormice and the endemic Sicilian pond turtle live in the park. The hill towns, San Fratello, where a Gallo-Italic dialect brought by Lombard settlers in the eleventh century is still spoken, Mistretta, San Marco d'Alunzio and Floresta, the highest village in Sicily, keep a pastoral culture of cheeses, hams and festivals.

Nebrodi Regional Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open at all times. Spring, from April to June, brings wild peonies, orchids and the fresh green of the beeches, and is the best season for walking; summer is hot on the coast and pleasantly cool in the forest, which is where Sicilians go to escape it; October and early November have the beech woods in colour, mushrooms and chestnuts;

winter brings snow to the ridge, enough for snowshoeing around Floresta and Monte Soro, and closes some tracks. The clay tracks are impassable after heavy rain, fog is common on the crest, and mobile coverage is poor. Allow a full day, two with the vulture cliffs. Etna Nord and Randazzo are just south of Cesarò, Cefalù and the Madonie to the west, Tindari and the Aeolian ferry port of Milazzo on the coast to the north.