The forest above the sea

The Gargano is Puglia’s odd corner. A limestone promontory that geologically belongs to the far side of the Adriatic, covered in a beech forest that belongs several hundred kilometres north, ringed by white towns that would not look out of place in Greece. It is the spur on the boot, and it behaves like a different region because for most of history it was one.

This is a guide to crossing it: from the sea on the south side, up into the forest, and down to the sea on the north. It can be driven in three hours. Give it two days.

Why the Gargano is not like the rest of Puglia

Everywhere else in Puglia is flat or gently rolling, dry, and planted with olives and wheat. The Gargano rises to over a thousand metres and catches the weather. The high ground is wooded, the coast is cliffs and coves, and the whole promontory has been a national park since 1991. It was an island once, before the plain of the Tavoliere silted up and joined it to the mainland, and it still feels like one.

The forest at the top is called the Foresta Umbra, the shadowy forest, and it is the largest stand of old beech in southern Italy. In 2017 a piece of it was added to the UNESCO listing of Europe’s ancient beech woods, alongside forests in the Carpathians and the Alps. That a beech forest of that kind exists an hour from a beach umbrella is the whole strange pleasure of the place.

Start at Mattinata, on the sea

Mattinata sits on the south coast where the olive terraces run down to a wide bay. It is a working town rather than a resort, and its coast to the east is the most dramatic on the Gargano: white limestone cliffs dropping into water so clear it looks shallow when it is not. The Baia delle Zagare, with its two sea stacks standing off the beach, is the postcard. Vignanotica, a little further on, is a long pale beach at the foot of a cliff, reached by a path and better for it.

Swim in the morning, before the road. Then turn inland and start climbing.

Into the Foresta Umbra

The road up from Mattinata rises through scrub and then, without much warning, into trees. Within a few kilometres the olives are gone, the light has changed, and you are driving through a tunnel of beech with the temperature falling as you go. It is a shock every time.

The forest covers more than ten thousand hectares of the high plateau. Beech dominates, with oak, maple and yew, and some of the trees are several centuries old. In the middle, by the road, there is a visitor centre with a small museum of the forest’s wildlife, a lake with a fenced enclosure of deer that have become fairly tame, and the start of the marked walking trails. Take one. An hour on foot in the beech woods, in silence broken only by woodpeckers and the occasional roe deer crashing off through the undergrowth, is worth more than any viewpoint on the Gargano.

The forest has no views, in fact. That is part of its character. It is inward, cool and green, and after the glare of the coast it feels like a room with the lights turned down.

Vico del Gargano and the orange groves

The road drops out of the forest on the north side into a different climate again. Vico del Gargano sits on a ridge with citrus groves below it, and it has been growing oranges since the Middle Ages on a stretch of coast that faces the morning sun and is sheltered from everything else. The old town is a tangle of stepped lanes and stone stairways, with a castle at the top and a famously narrow alley, the width of two people pressed together, that the town has adopted as a shrine to its patron saint Valentine and to kissing in general. It is silly and rather lovely.

Stop for a coffee and a paposcia, the local bread roll split and filled with whatever is good that day, and buy oranges if it is the season.

Peschici on its rock

Peschici is the north coast’s white town, stacked on a headland above a curve of sandy beach, with something faintly eastern in its cubic houses and flat roofs. It was founded by Slavs in the tenth century, which explains the name and the look, and it has spent the centuries since watching for ships. From the terrace at the top you can see the whole bay and, on a clear day, the Tremiti islands on the horizon.

The beach below the town is sand and shallow water, good for an afternoon. But the reason to come to Peschici is the road that leaves it.

The coast road and the trabucchi

Between Peschici and Vieste the road runs along the cliff top for twenty-odd kilometres, dipping into coves and climbing out of them, with pines on one side and the sea on the other. It is slow, and it should be. Every few kilometres a wooden structure appears on the rocks below: a platform of pine trunks lashed together, with long arms reaching out over the water and a net slung between them. These are the trabucchi, fishing machines that have been built and rebuilt on this coast for centuries. A net is lowered, fish are watched for from the platform, and when a shoal passes the net is winched up with a hand windlass. Several still fish. Several more now serve lunch on the platform, which is one of the better places in Puglia to eat something that was in the sea an hour ago.

Stop at one. Even if you do not eat, walk out onto the planks and look down through the gaps at the water.

Vieste at the end

Vieste is the Gargano’s capital in everything but name, an old town on a limestone spur with the sea on three sides and a cathedral and a castle on top. The lanes are steep and whitewashed, the light is extraordinary in the evening, and in summer the town is very full. Come in June or September and it is easy to love.

Its landmark stands on the beach just south of the old town: the Pizzomunno, a single white pillar of limestone twenty-five metres high, standing on the sand as if placed there. The legend is of a fisherman turned to stone by jealous sirens while his beloved waited for him; the town has built a small industry on it and the rock does not seem to mind. From the harbour, boats run along the coast to the sea caves and out to the Tremiti islands, and either trip is the best possible last morning.

What to eat on the Gargano

The forest and the coast meet on the plate. Caciocavallo podolico is a hard cheese from the cows that graze the high pastures, aged for years and eaten in shards with honey. Lamb comes from the same hills. On the coast it is fish, simply grilled, and in Vieste the restaurants along the harbour are as good as anywhere for it. Oranges from Vico, and in Monte Sant’Angelo, at the top of the southern road, a sweet made of two communion wafers pressed around caramelised almonds, which you will either love or find very odd.

Then, if you have a third day, drive back up into the forest and walk again. The Gargano is the only place in Puglia where you can swim in the morning, walk in the woods after lunch, and be back on the beach for the evening. Use it.