Nature and Protected areas
The Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park
A protected area of 150,000 hectares, three regions (Abruzzo, Marche and Lazio), five Provinces (L’Aquila, Teramo, Pescara, Ascoli Piceno, Rieti) and 44 towns within its borders.
It is these numbers that make Gran Sasso and Monti della Larga Park the most extensive and precious protected areas in Europe, a unique naturalistic- environmental asset , characterized by an extraordinary variety of wildlife.
The Park is home to some 2600 vegetable species, equating to around a fifth of European plant life, and a faunal kingdom that boasts the most represented Apennine animals: the wolf, the Abruzzo Chamois , the bear and the royal eagle.
A prodigious treasure originating from the imposing Italian Gran Sasso mountain range of which Corno Grande (2914mt) forms a part, together with some suggestive glacial valleys (the Val Chiarino, the Valle del Venacquaro and the Calderone, the most southern European glacier), and then to the mellow grasslands, highlands and woods integrating themselves with the millennial work of man.