Parco della Maremma (Uccellina) visitor gateway
The visitor centre at Alberese is a modest building on Via del Bersagliere, but step through it and you're at the edge of something genuinely old — coastline, macchia, marsh and the dark shapes of the Uccellina hills rising to 417 metres at Poggio Lecci. This is Tuscany's first regional park, established in 1975, and it protects a stretch of the Maremma coast that has been lived in, raided, farmed and half-forgotten across fifty thousand years.
Two dozen caves, the broken towers of a medieval coastal defence network, an abandoned abbey, and somewhere in the scrub, the last working butteri — Maremma's traditional herders — still moving cattle the way they always have.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to split between two routes: the A2 'Le Torri' walk (7 km, manageable) for the watchtowers and sea light, and the A1 up to San Rabano abbey (7.8 km, a proper uphill) for the silence at the ruins. Both reward an early start. The Line 17 bus from the visitor centre saves the walk to the trailhead.
Deals in Parco della Maremma (Uccellina) visitor gateway
Book directly at the providerHow Parco della Maremma (Uccellina) visitor gateway came to be
People have been sheltering in these hills since the Middle Palaeolithic, roughly 50,000 years ago. The Abbey of San Rabano rose around the year 1000, its triapsidal church taking shape over the following two centuries. It survived until the Black Death of 1348 began its slow unravelling, and by 1475 the monks were gone; the building was permanently abandoned in the sixteenth century and sat untouched for four hundred years before restoration work began.
The watchtowers along the coast — Collelungo, Cala Forno, Torre dell'Uccellina and others — tell a different story: in April 1543, the Saracen pirate Barbarossa raided this shore and carried off a local woman, Margherita Marsili, who later became bride of Sultan Soliman II. The regional government formally protected the area in 1975, and the park received the European Diploma for protected areas in 1992.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are dry and warm, with August averaging 25°C and little rain, but the fire risk closes free access to trails from mid-June through mid-September. Spring and early autumn bring temperatures between 17–25°C, manageable light, and far fewer people; November can be wet, and January cool but rarely cold.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.