The Park's environment

Park Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli is distinguished by the remarkable variety of natural environments and water is the key to it all: marshes, ponds, gullies, swamps and canals that alternate with deciduous and evergreen woods and border the long strand to form an incredible environment with a variety that reveals the extraordinary abundance and diversity of animal and vegetal species.

Strands and Dunes

An immense beach lines the coast of Park Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli providing an unusual landscape: a thin and uneven strip of sand, a few dozen metres wide, that continues for kilometres without a glimpse of a building or manmade device. This is the type of environment that has all but disappeared in Italy and can be observed here in its original form.

The strands and sandy dunes, that can reach a height of 7-10 metres, continue for 23 Km of coastline, from Calambrone to Viareggio. Apart from representing a factor of great natural prestige, the dunal systems, that connect the coastal bands to the typical forest environments found inland, play a fundamental role as bastions safeguarding and conserving the most inland ecosystems that are distinctive to the protected area.

The strands take up around 250 hectares of Park Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli and are subjected to the winds and tides that deposit, among other elements, a remarkable quantity of nutritional materials. They are colonised by numerous sandpiper birds, that scamper in the salty mud water or in the wetlands a little further inland, and vegetal species - above all species that thrive in sandy soils – with the shrubs performing a useful wind-breaker action and anchoring the dunes.

The very rustic, yet beautiful, pioneer plants are also features of the dunal band and coastline vegetation, such as the sand knapweed, the goldenrod, the helichrysum or, in the sandiest inland areas, tufts of Ravenna grass.