Pollino

Pollino National Park was created in 1993 straddling Basilicata and Calabria and at 1,926 km² it is the largest in Italy. Its massif rises halfway between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas, in one of the most tectonically active zones of the central Mediterranean: the Apennine-Calabrian-Peloritan orogenic system, formed by the convergence of the African and European plates, which has generated here the fault system known as the Pollino Line and has emplaced onto the continental plate well-preserved ophiolite suites, fragments of oceanic lithosphere from the ancient Tethys. That geological value earned it designation as a UNESCO Global Geopark.

Its emblem is the loricate pine (Pinus leucodermis), a pine with bark armoured in plates that grows clinging to the rock outcrops at high altitude, twisted by the wind, and whose only significant Italian population is here. The park also preserves some of the most valuable beech woods in Europe: those of Cozzo Ferriero and Pollinello, with trees up to 500 years old and the oldest known European beech, at around 620 years. Cozzo Ferriero, a strict reserve of some 70 hectares representing barely 0.05 % of the park's area, is the most southerly beech wood in Europe and has not been worked for more than eighty years because of its remoteness.

In 2017 those beech woods were added to the transnational serial property Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, inscribed on the World Heritage List. The wildlife is that of the southern Apennines, with Apennine wolf, Italian roe deer, wildcat, otter and a cliff-dwelling birdlife that includes golden eagle and reintroduced griffon vulture. The territory also preserves Arbëreshë communities, of Albanian origin, settled here since the fifteenth century.