The warm season is upon us and the desire to travel is growing. Even if travel is not possible for the moment, we can start planning our trips, to be undertaken in the coming months.
The Aosta Valley is a perfect destination to escape from the routine and the city and immerse yourself in nature but also in the history and traditions of this beautiful region.
The Gran Paradiso National Park covers 70,000 hectares of high mountain territory. The symbol of the park is the ibex, also thanks to the history that determined its birth: in 1856, King Vittorio Emanuele II declared these mountains a royal hunting reserve to save the ibex from extinction, and later the reserve was donated to the Italian State to become a protected park.
Other protagonists are the chamois, the marmot and among the birds, the golden eagle, as well as many small passerines. More recent acquisitions in the park are the lammergeyer, a large vulture that disappeared in the early 1900s and has returned to nest in the park after being reintroduced to the Alps thanks to an international project, and the lynx, a splendid small predator.
Thanks to the three visitor centres in Cogne, Valsavarenche and Rhêmes-Notre-Dame, it is possible to explore the various naturalistic aspects of the protected area in every season.
Not to be missed in Cogne is the Paradisia alpine garden, especially in July, when many of the garden’s over 1,000 flower species are in full bloom.
The Mont Avic Nature Park was established in 1989 and is the first regional nature park in Valle d’Aosta. The upper Champorcher valley has vast grasslands that are home to ibexes, chamois and marmots. The park, which in the past was used for mining, now offers a spectacle of great beauty: over a third of the protected area is covered by extensive forests of mountain pine, Scots pine, larch and beech.
In addition, it presents particular geological formations, Alpine floristic endemisms and plant associations linked to the substratum of green stones, sheets of water, marshes and peat bogs, without equal in number and extension in the Aosta Valley.
