Villaggio Mancuso,Sila Piccola, Catanzaro

The main tourist village of Villaggio Mancuso, Sila Piccola is a delightful, characteristic village with wooden chalet style buildings. This residential area in the middle of the beautiful woods has a wide range of amenities, a church, shops, restaurants, bars and near Villaggio Palumbo (30 minute drive) where the ski lifts and slopes are and the lakes (15 minutes). The Sila, enchanting Calabrian mountains, is a green plateau all meadows, water, forests, tall Corsican pines, vast open spaces and delightful lakes. It is divided into Sila Grande and Sila Piccola, with cultivated areas with woods, slopes, peaks that rise to almost 2000 metres above sea level, equipped with numerous winter sports centres. Sila has also a huge variety of fauna, with the presence of wolves, honey-buzzards, boar and roe-deer. It’s a natural paradise, with the National Park that lies on a surface area of more than 12,000 hectares, divided in the two provinces of Cosenza ( Sila Grande) and Catanzaro (Sila Piccola).

The Sila is a splendid environment with the possibility of many excursions and still offers uncontaminated natural zones, gurgling water falls and springs, and most of all a wonderful landscape. The Sila Piccola’s climate is harsher than Sila Grande, with more abundant rainfall and snow that can sometimes be over 2 metres deep. In this part, more wilder than Sila Grande, the predominant tree is beech, followed by the white fir, larch, mountain maple and alder. Both places offer, cleared areas used as pasture land and in the forested regions, an abundance of flower species with scenes of rare beauty during the blooming season.

Of exceptional interest are the so called “ Giants of the Sila” , majestic secular Austrian pines which reach a height of 50 m and 1 and half metres in diameter. In the Sila there are centres rich in history and traditions with many local restaurants offering a delicious local cuisine (salame, porcini mushrooms cooked in different ways, pork meat etc.), different pubs, hotels and picnic areas that offer the visitors the chance to enjoy these beautiful un-explored places. Mancuso village (on Catanzaro side), for example, offers Monaco’s park, with a hill lake, an educational nature walk, a path for disabled, a medicinal and aromatic herb garden and a deer farm.