Salento South coast offers some stunning coastal scenery: green wooded hills give way to white cliffs, sea stacks, azure crystalline seas, golden sands and paradisiacal pebbly coves. With our tour of the South coast of Otranto you will discover all this. All the guided tours can be combined with the Italian language courses.
The tour of the South coast of Otranto includes:
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- Visit to the Hypogeum an old and mysterious church under the ground of the IX century;
- Visit to the colorful bauxite lake one of most charming and paradisiac natural places of the Otrantine coast;
- Your next stop will be at Punta Palascia, at the easternmost point of Puglia, where you can admire the Saracene tower that was built to protect Puglians against attacks from the sea. There was a danger from pirates and Turkish invaders.
- Visit to the remains of the monastery of S. Nicola di Casole: the 2nd biggest library of the XI century in the Mediterranean area, the first students’ house in Europe, very important centre for the Greek and Byzantine cultures. Umberto Eco took the idea for his book “the Name of the Rose” from this monastery;
- Visit to the fortified farm houses of the XV century: understanding how they got the form of fortified castles to defend against Turkish invasion in 1480. The Famhouse (“Masseria”) was the set of most famous Italian film such us Mine Vaganti by Ferzan Opztek. Stops to admire the landscape: the cliffs are often lofty and inaccessible, yet they teem with caves and gorges that form a jagged coastline.
- Visit to Porto Badisco (charming little bay) with a sandy beach and rocks by the side. According to the Roman writer Virgil, it was here that Aeneas fleeing from the city of Troy landed. Here there is a beautiful cave, the Grotta dei Cervi, where art from the Neolithic period was found;
- Visit to S. Cesarea Terme: Arab style town, and Porto Miggiano Bay, a small imressive bay with white sand and crystal clear water where the color of the sea is Caribbean;
- visit to Castro and grotto Zinzulusa, boat-tour to the Grotta Azzura (where the colour of the sea is deep-blue) and the Pigeon’s Grotto (entrance 5 Euro).
