The Serranella Oasis

A dam built for industry turned within a few years into a marsh, then an oasis, then a reserve: three hundred hectares where the Sangro and the Aventino meet.

The story

The Serranella Oasis lies inside a Site of Community Importance shared between the municipal areas of Casoli, Altino and Sant'Eusanio del Sangro, in the province of Chieti.

Just below the confluence of the Sangro and the Aventino, a dam was built to hold back the water needed for the industrial demands of the valley and for irrigating farmland. Within a short time the lake became a marsh rich in plants and animals, with bulrushes, rushes and club-rushes as the dominant vegetation. In this way the whole area grew steadily more important from a naturalistic point of view, until it became a WWF oasis in 1987 and a Regional Nature Reserve in 1990, covering about 300 hectares.

A rebuilt environment

Over the past ten years, thanks to the restoration work set out in the management plan, the richness of the river habitat is being rebuilt with pools, oxbows and flooded ground, so as to bring the place back to what it originally looked like.

Among the more important plant species are the marsh orchid, the flowering rush, purple loosestrife and common yellow loosestrife. About seventy species nest here — among them the night heron, the kingfisher and the pintail, the elegant duck that is the symbol of the Oasis — while more than two hundred have been recorded over the years of observation, some of them very rare: the great white egret, the spoonbill, the black stork, the osprey, the flamingo.

Along the edges of the reservoir are wide bands of riverside woodland made up mostly of willow, poplar, alder and pedunculate oak — an oak once far more widespread in the lowland forests, so much so that large specimens have been found in the gravel workings and are now displayed in the Oasis as evidence of another age.

Visiting

The visitor centre, near the weir in the Sant'Eusanio area, is much used for environmental education by pupils and students who come from outside the region as well. In the Altino area, at Scosse, besides the paths that lead round the oxbows, you can watch the Sangro and the Aventino meet and, from a purpose-built hide, catch the animals that settle here in complete quiet.

The surprises do not end there: in the Oasis you also come across two works installed by the Arte Natura association, “La collina degli alberi morti” (The Hill of Dead Trees) by Sebastiano A. De Laurentiis and “La Biscia” (The Water Snake) by Nunzio Di Stefano.