Trekking National Park Abruzzo: Into the Oldest Protected Wilderness in Italy
Trekking in the National Park of Abruzzo is an encounter with one of the oldest and most ecologically significant protected areas in Italy — a wilderness of beech forests, limestone peaks, and river valleys in the southern Apennines that has been under protection since 1923 and that harbors populations of Marsican brown bear, Apennine wolf, and Abruzzo chamois that have survived here while disappearing from most of the rest of Europe. The Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise covers approximately 50,000 hectares of territory across three regions, but its heart is the valley of the Sangro river around Pescasseroli — a small mountain town that functions as the park’s main base and the starting point for the majority of the trekking routes that cross the park’s varied terrain. Walking here is walking through a landscape that has been recovering for a century from centuries of overuse, and the result — dense forest, clean water, and wildlife visible in daylight — is one of the most rewarding natural environments in the Italian peninsula.
The Bears: Abruzzo’s Most Famous Residents
The Marsican brown bear is the park’s most celebrated and most elusive resident — a subspecies of the European brown bear that survives here in a population of approximately 60 individuals, the last viable bear population in central and southern Europe. The bears are present throughout the park but are most reliably seen in the Val Fondillo and the Valle di Opi, where the combination of beech mast and mountain meadow provides ideal feeding conditions in late summer and autumn. Sightings require patience, early morning walks, and a degree of luck, but the knowledge that bears are present in the forest — visible occasionally at a distance, audible occasionally at night — gives the trekking here a dimension of genuine wildness that the more manicured protected areas of northern Italy cannot match.
The Trekking Routes
The park’s network of marked trails covers every level of difficulty and every type of terrain. The Val Fondillo, reached by road from Opi, is the most visited valley in the park — a narrow gorge of beech forest and clear water with a flat path along the river that is accessible to all levels and offers the best chance of wildlife encounters close to the road. The ascent to the Valico di Monte Tranquillo, above the town of Civitella Alfedena, crosses open mountain pasture with views across the park toward the Majella massif to the north. The longer routes that cross the park from the Sangro valley to the Valle di Comino on the Lazio side pass through terrain that is genuinely remote — a full day’s walking through beech forest, limestone ridges, and high meadows where the chamois are visible from a distance and the wolves pass through at night. The park administration requires registration for some routes and provides detailed maps at the visitor centers in Pescasseroli and Civitella Alfedena.
Pescasseroli and the Park Villages
The villages within the park boundary — Pescasseroli, Opi, Civitella Alfedena, Barrea — are small mountain communities whose economies have been shaped by the park’s presence for a century. Pescasseroli is the largest and the most developed, its hotels and restaurants serving the trekkers and wildlife watchers who make it their base. The village museum documents the history of the park and the ecology of its wildlife in a manner that is both informative and genuinely engaging. The lake of Barrea, an artificial reservoir created in the 1950s, reflects the surrounding mountains in a way that has made it one of the most photographed landscapes in the park, and the road that follows its shoreline is one of the finest short drives in the Abruzzo interior.
National Park of Abruzzo on a Self-Drive
Trekking in the National Park of Abruzzo connects naturally into a self-guided tour of Abruzzo that combines the park with the Abruzzo countryside and the Trabocchi Coast on the Adriatic. Explore the full Abruzzo region to plan your itinerary, then contact our team to start building your trip, or learn more about how a self-guided tour works.
