Park Authority

The Cinque Terre National Park, with its 3,868 hectares, in the province of La Spezia, in Liguria, is one of the smallest and at the same time most populated National Parks in Italy, with its around 4,000 inhabitants divided into five villages: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. In more than one thousand years man modified this natural environment by sectioning the steep slopes to obtain stretches of cultivable land, the so-called "ciàn", supported by thousands of kilometers of dry-stone walls. This is Cinque Terre's real characterizing feature, with an atypical and strongly anthropized landscape: this is the reason why the territory of the men's Park established in 1999 has become a World Heritage in 1997.

The National Park was conceived to be an instrument to protect, safeguard and enhance the territory, the local identity and the biodiversity of Cinque Terre, an area which deeply changed its geographical and morphological appearance as a consequence of human hard work. In fact, the ancient inhabitants of these places, without being forced by despotic sovereigns, but only for the need to obtain cultivated areas in a hostile environment, replaced the ancient natural vegetation of these steep slopes with a thick texture of terraces cultivated with grapevine. In the last years the Cinque Terre National Park and the Cinque Terre Marine Protected Area, that have become part of the Cetacean Sanctuary since 1999, activated a series of projects with many Italian and European protected areas.