Montecristo Island: reservations are underway to discover paradise

Montecristo seems to have been born to stay away from the world: it stands like a huge pyramid-shaped rock crossed by a mountain range. Practically an impregnable natural fortress, for which the only possible landing place has always been Cala Maestra.

Pirates also landed here to refuel with water, and it was they – in 1553 – who attacked the Monastery of San Mamiliano: then the only construction of Montecristo as well as the place where the legendary hidden treasure protagonist of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, the novel that made her famous. After the assault the monks left the island where they had lived as hermits for a thousand years, so Montecristo remained uninhabited until, in 1952, the English lord George Watson Taylor he bought it and built the royal villa which a few years later – in 1859 he sold to the Kingdom of Italy. In 1899, in fact, the island became an exclusive hunting reserve of Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy, and it remained so until it became a Nature Reserve.

Even today the royal villa is the only building, home to the State Forestry Corps and a small naturalistic museum, but otherwise in Montecristo there is no trace of anthropization. IS a riot of Mediterranean plant species such as heather, rosemary and helichrysum, as well as rare animals: this is where the only Italian population of wild goats survives, the goats of Montecristoand moreover it is a birdwatching paradise because it is a place of passage for numerous migratory birds and is home to species like the Corsican gull, the shearwater or the golden eagle. The seabed is also very rich, with posidonia meadows, sea anemones, corals. All this, however, to be seen at a safe distance, because bathing (as well as navigation) is prohibited.