Gran Paradiso

Italy's first national park (1922) grew out of a curious history: the area had been fenced off as a royal hunting ground by Victor Emmanuel II in 1856 to protect the Alpine ibex, then on the edge of extinction from poaching. In 1919 his grandson, King Victor Emmanuel III, gave the land to the Italian state, which turned it into a national park three years later. Thanks to that early protection, Gran Paradiso today holds the largest Alpine ibex population in the world and remains, together with neighbouring Vanoise in France — with cross-border cooperation since 1972 — the largest unbroken protected area in the western Alps.