A magnet for walkers and foodies, but threatened by its own success, Italy's Cinque Terre National Park is fighting to conserve its agricultural heritage, writes Paddy Woodworth
Most national parks aim to let nature run wild, or at least to give the appearance of wilderness. The Cinque Terre is almost unique in that it is deliberately managed in order to keep nature at bay, and to recover a very distinctively human habitat.
Mind you, it is still possible to walk many of its magnificent hiking trails today, and not to notice this at all. These mule tracks wind perilously above the shimmering Mediterranean, often almost lost in dense maquis scrub vegetation or groves of sweet chestnut and holm oak. Pause on one of the many headland cliff tops, 200m (655ft) above the sea, and you may feel as remote from humankind as you would in the alpine meadows of Yosemite.
But within five minutes several dozen German pensioners, or American backpackers, are likely to come trampling all over your solitude. The popularity of this remote corner of the Italian Riviera, south of Genoa and north of La Spezia, has caused chronic congestion on the paths in recent years.
Ironically, many tourists are drawn by the reputed remoteness of the five villages along which the Cinque Terre (literally, "five lands") National Park is strung. And indeed Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarolo and Riomaggiore were, until the late-19th century, linked only by these vertiginous trails, and by the sea.
The villages are spread out more or less evenly along a 15km (9.3 mile) coast. The walks between them vary from dead easy to moderately demanding, and all rich in architectural and natural interest. More adventurous walkers can ascend to a series of paths joining the villages' "sanctuary churches" about 200m (655ft) higher up, or all the way to a ridge route with panoramic views parallel to the lower paths.
Spoiled for choice, you can vary each walk from village to village. After you finally stop for lunch, you can hop on a boat or train back to base, if the wine has made you a little sleepy.
Long before the first tourists arrived, the Rome-Turin railway had in fact ended the isolation of the region. But there is still no coastal road, and cars are effectively banned from the village streets. So you can dine undisturbed outdoors on some of the finest seafood you will find anywhere, and savour the very best pesto (best because it was invented here) and excellent local wine.
These products are the key to the Cinque Terre's very special landscape, which in turn is the reason the park enjoys the rare status of a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The park also includes a marine area of significant biodiversity, but it is the man-made terraces that once rose high above it all along the coast that make this such a very special place.
From about the year 1000, local people began the arduous task of clearing the forests that dominated the higher slopes above the villages, and the almost impenetrable maquis that covered the lower areas. By pushing back untamed nature, they proceeded to build a new landscape, quite literally, and by hand.
They constructed small dry-stone terraces that somehow clung to the steep hillsides. Like the Aran Islanders, they had to carry earth down, and seaweed up, to create fertile soil within the enclosing walls. They had to invent a system of channels which would at once irrigate the crops and draw off water to prevent flooding, which collapses the terraces and often leads to landslides, the bane of the region.
Over the next millennium, these terraces produced some of the finest olives, basil (for the pesto), vines and citrus fruits in Liguria, if not in Italy.
This was small-scale, low-tech agriculture, but its high quality was widely recognised down the centuries.
The people who built this productive landscape had to work together, and there is a long tradition of egalitarianism and co-operation.
NO ONE IS prouder of the Cinque Terre's history and traditions than Gianfranco Bonanini. A local man, his vision helped bring the park into being in 1999, and he is its first president. He stresses the sheer scale of the terraces, variously estimated to measure between 2,000 and 6,700km (1,242-4,163 miles) if laid end to end.
"It was as though our ancestors built the great wall of China, but without slavery and with no external authority," he says. "It was only when the land began to be abandoned that we realised what we were losing: not only an agricultural system, but a method of stabilising our geology." This is one of his strongest arguments for restoring the terraces. Their gradual collapse, coupled with the clogging of the irrigation system, greatly increases the risk of landslides. He reckons that the four villages which are at sea level are in real and present danger unless a long flight from hard labour on the land is at least partially reversed.
The abandonment of the terraces began shortly after they had reached their maximum extension, about 1,400 hectares (5.4 square miles), in the 1920s. The railway had already begun attracting young people away to jobs in the cities. By the 1950s a new wave of post-war industrialisation in nearby La Spezia turned an exodus of youth into a stampede.
"You didn't stand much chance of finding a wife in those days if you stayed on the farm," says Bonanini dryly. He was one of the ones who stayed, but by 1990 the area under cultivation had plummeted to less than 100 hectares (0.4 square miles).
At exactly the same time, more and more tourists were finding that the mule paths made by labourers were marvellous for leisure hiking. Bonanini believes this was the most dangerous moment for the future of the region.
"People started giving the tourists what they thought the tourists wanted. So they built hotels in Monterosso, and they cooked German sausages for the Germans, fish and chips for the British. This was a tourism completely divorced from the real life and gastronomic character of the Cinque Terre.
"It would have reached a point where agriculture produced one per cent of our wealth, and tourism 99 per cent. But we were forgetting that it was agriculture which made the landscape that attracted the tourists in the first place. If we lost the landscape, we stood to lose everything."
From the 1970s, as a leading member of the region's agricultural co-operative, Bonanini had helped introduce the trenino, an ingenious network of clunky but efficient monorails. These "little trains" took the worst of the back-breaking labour out of moving people, products and tools up and down the hills. But the flight from the land had continued.
AS A POPULAR mayor of Riomaggiore, he campaigned for the Unesco World Heritage Site designation, achieved in 1997, and National Park status, established two years later. Clearly, those who stood to get rich quickly by building hotels and apartments blocks were sorely disappointed. Bonanini recognises wryly that he has lost a number of personal friends. But in a 1999 local election campaign, which he describes as a "referendum on the park", his Socialist Party (PSI) got 90 per cent of the vote. He claims that his initiatives still have strong popular support.
He will certainly need it. A no-nonsense, hands-on man, Bonanini says bluntly that "we have too many tourists already". Too many walkers are eroding the very paths they come to walk on. A small charge for each sector is probably an insufficient deterrent, but it is helping to finance the park's restoration work.
He insists on sustainable development at every stage, and seems to be getting his way. No new hotels can be built in the park. All those renting out rooms must meet strict ecological standards, and all restaurants must base their menus on local produce, or the park will not market them. "The days of the German sausage are over," he says.
His core project, however, remains the restoration of the terraces. The park has legal power to take over uncultivated land for 20 years. It will then be offered back to the owners, but only on the condition that they maintain it.
New holiday homes are only permitted on the basis of adapting existing traditional structures, and then only on the condition of restoring a further tranche of land.
In the park's first six years, encroaching natural vegetation has been pushed back again from about 50 restored hectares (0.2 square miles). The intimate local knowledge of older people - each terrace has its own characteristics - has been documented and preserved, just in time. Bonanini's target is to reach a total of 400 hectares (1.54 square miles) of fully functioning agricultural land. Then, he believes, agriculture and nature will be able to coexist in a balance appropriate to the heritage of the Cinque Terre.
Cinque Terre National Park website: www.parconazionale5terre.it