With 865 km of coastline Puglia has the largest contact with the sea than any other region on the italian peninsula.
With 2700 years of history the thinnest and longest region of the country is 19000 square kilometres for 4.090.266 inhabitants, 98% is plain (53%) and hill (45%), making Puglia the least mountainous region in Italy.
The highest point, in fact, is mountain Cornacchia at 1152m in the Foggia province where we border with the apennines of Campania region.
Puglia has no rivers and no lakes and a karst geology that doesn’t allow for rain water to be accumulated and that actually generates huge and amazing underground caves as the Castellana’s can prove, the longest in Europe.
This, in 1902, has brought the region to commit in a project that still today is valued as one of the most important and challenging of hydraulic engineering in the world: the acquedotto Pugliese, that has required 20.000 workers and a system of 21.000 km of lenght to completion.
60 millions more or less are the olive trees that ennoble our landscape, 14 times the number of the inhabitants, with more than 20% of them monumental, tagged and safeguarded for being hundreds of years old up to thousands.
Puglia is also the leader in Italy in the production of table grape and wine, extra virgin olive oil and olives, durum wheat, tomatoes, almonds, cherries, organic fruit and artichokes, plus a good variety of certified traditional products like the Torre Canne’s Regina tomato, the Polignano carrots and the Altamura bread.
44,3% of the total energy consumed is produced from wind, solar and bioenergy, we have the potential to reach 100%.. (give us time…)
The only polytechnic university in southern Italy is in Puglia in Bari; in Modugno (just outside Bari) instead some sophisticated microchips were produced for NASA’s curiosity robot, that landed on Mars in 2012.
The intense and diverse colonization of Puglia as brought today to have different languages and dialects throughout the region, that we can subdivide in 9 categories: Salentino, Apulo-Baresi, Dauno, transition ones, Molisano, Griko (Greek family), Francoprovenzale (Southern France family), Ischitano (Napolitan family) and Arbereshe (Albanian family).
See map below and enjoy our diversity in sounds (unfortunately only in Italian language).
In 2016 Puglia hosted more than 3,3 millions tourists growing more than 6% from the year before, and we expect those numbers to double and more in the years to come.
The fact that the internationalization is still below the national numbers (23% in Puglia against 49% in the rest of Italy) makes us even more attractive and real at least for now…(we are committed to stay as beautiful and genuine as we have been so far).