Circeo National Park

A compact national park covering the Monte Circeo promontory, the coastal dune system, the Pontine Lake chain (Lago di Sabaudia, Lago di Paola, Lago dei Monaci, Lago di Caprolace), and a strip of lowland forest. The park is small by Italian standards — about 8,900 hectares — but ecologically rich, protecting a fragment of the Mediterranean coastal forest that once covered the entire Pontine coastline.

The park visitor centre in the village has trail maps and information on the resident wildlife, which includes wild boar, roe deer, badger, and a good range of resident and migrating birds. The walking trails on Monte Circeo are the primary attraction, but the coastal lagoons are worth exploring by kayak in spring and autumn for birdwatching.

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A story
Circeo was one of Italy's first four national parks, established in 1934. It was created partly to protect the remnant forests of the Pontine Plain, most of which were drained and cleared under Mussolini's vast reclamation project in the 1930s — the same project that created the grid of arrow-straight roads and the towns of Latina and Sabaudia. The park's forests are essentially all that survived of a landscape that once extended for hundreds of kilometres.

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