The orchid path of Zingaro natural reserve

Spring has arrived! This year we decided to travel to Sicily as it is not too cold and I would love to see the Mediterranean spring. The hunt for orchids was one of the highlights of our trip, and fortunately, we discovered a heaven for orchid enthusiasts in Zingaro Natural Reserve located on the North-Western side of the island.

The history of the reserve itself is very interesting but we will keep it for our next post about Scopello Zingaro and surrounding areas.

As you can see in the photos, it was a cloudy day, which actually makes for great photography conditions. It did rain a bit briefly but it’s much better than burning sun. Other than the orchids there were a lot of other flora. Some of them are so perfumed that we can smell the scent in the air during the hike.

In the morning we took the Sentiero delle Orchidee which runs higher on the coast and we spent hours taking pictures and observing the plants, and eventually had to skip taking photos of some specimen. We returned to Scopello from the lower path close to the sea where you can find fewer orchids and the kind of vegetation is more influenced by coastal environment.

Even though we visited some day later than the maximum blooming period we were lucky that we found 13 species out of the 25 recorded species¹ thanks to the excitement of Tui scavenging for the orchids throughout the trail. We saw bee orchids, micro-orchid, man orchids, tongue orchids, and more (you can check our observations on iNaturalist). Our favorite was the mirror orchid (Ophrys speculum).

Species we observed were: 1. Anacamptis papilionacea, 2. Neotinea tridentata, 3. Ophrys apifera, 4. Ophrys bombyliflora, 5. Ophrys fuciflora oxyrrhynchos, 6. Ophrys fusca, 7. Ophrys lutea, 8. Ophrys speculum, 9. Orchis anthropophora, 10. Orchis brancifortii, 11. Orchis italica, 12. Serapias lingua, 13. Serapias parviflora.