On the Sila plateau there are trees up to 45 metres high, with a trunk 2 metres wide and an extraordinary age of 350 years, witnesses of the ancient silane forests. A forest over a hundred years old with over 60 examples of larch pines and mountain maples planted in the seventeenth century by the Baroni Mollo, owners of the nearby Casino, donated to the FAI in 2016.
The forest was exploited over the centuries by shepherds to extract from the logs a resin as flammable as pitch; it was a precious resource that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was the subject of numerous measures of the government of Naples, issued to limit the frequent threats of felling. With the Second World War, the land was expropriated and then reintegrated into the heritage of the former State Forestry Company which, together with the Mollo family, promoted the establishment of the current Guided Biogenetic Nature Reserve in order to study, genetically preserve and protect this historical-natural heritage of enormous value. The intervention of man, today, has the sole purpose of letting nature take its course, and thus be able to observe the natural evolution of the forest offering a spontaneous environment to animals that now live in a few other places in the country.
Walking in the midst of this prodigy of undoubted spectacularity arouses wonder and admiration.
