Gran Paradiso National Park

Listen for a moment. Somewhere above you, a sharp whistle cuts across the rock. It is a marmot, warning its family that you have arrived. The air up here is thin and cool. It smells of larch resin, wet stone and crushed wild thyme. Underfoot, the path is uneven. Some of the stones were laid by hand a long time ago. Welcome to Gran Paradiso, the oldest national park in Italy.

The park sits across two regions. Part of it lies here in Piedmont, and part lies in the Aosta Valley to the north. At its heart rises the mountain that gives the park its name. Gran Paradiso is the only peak above four thousand metres that stands entirely inside Italy. Other Italian giants, like Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, share their summits with France or Switzerland. This one belongs to Italy alone.

The Piedmont side of the park is quieter than the Aosta side. Here, two long valleys climb toward the high ground. The Valle Orco runs past the village of Ceresole Reale and its wide, green-blue lake. The Valle Soana is narrower and more remote. Its hamlets are small clusters of stone houses with heavy slate roofs. Many were built by families who lived from cattle, cheese and a short summer season.

The story of this park begins with one animal — the Alpine ibex. It is a wild mountain goat. The males carry enormous curved horns, ridged like the rungs of a ladder. By the nineteenth century, hunters had wiped out the ibex across almost all of the Alps. Its horns were prized as trophies. Other parts of the animal were used in folk medicine. Only a small population survived, in these valleys.

Then came an unlikely protector. In the 1850s, King Victor Emmanuel the Second of the House of Savoy declared this area a royal hunting reserve. Here is the first surprise. The king loved to hunt ibex himself. But by claiming the land for the crown, he stopped everyone else from hunting. Royal gamekeepers patrolled the slopes. Poaching fell. Slowly, the ibex began to recover.

To reach his hunting grounds, the king had a network of mule tracks built across the mountains. These paths were engineered with care. They climb in steady zigzags, with stone walls holding the slopes in place. Many of them are still in use today as hiking trails. If the path beneath your feet feels unusually even and well graded, you may be walking on a royal track from the nineteenth century.

In the early twentieth century, the Savoy family gave the reserve to the Italian state. In 1922, the land became Gran Paradiso National Park, the first in the country. And here is the second surprise. Almost every Alpine ibex alive today, from France to Austria to Slovenia, descends from the animals that survived here. Over the past century, ibex from these valleys were moved to other mountain ranges to rebuild the population.

The ibex is not alone. Look across the open slopes for chamois. They are smaller and lighter than ibex, with short hooked horns and a dark stripe across the face. They move fast and nervously. In the meadows, marmots dig long tunnels and sit upright on boulders to sun themselves. High above, watch for the wide, slow circles of a golden eagle. The bearded vulture, once lost from the Alps, has also returned to these skies.

The landscape changes as you climb. In the valleys, you pass through forests of larch and spruce. Larch is unusual among conifers. It drops its needles every autumn, after turning a deep gold. Higher up, the trees give way to pasture and then to bare rock. Above that, you reach the glaciers. Between them lie small lakes of cold, very clear water that hold the sky like a mirror.

Summer brings the flowers. Alpine meadows here fill with gentians in intense blue, small pink primulas, and white edelweiss on the rocky ledges. The growing season is short, so everything blooms at once. In some places you can still see cattle grazing on the high pastures. This custom of moving herds uphill for the summer is called transhumance. It has shaped the mountains for centuries, and it continues on a smaller scale today.

From the Piedmont side, one road climbs above Ceresole Reale toward the Colle del Nivolet, a high pass. The views from the top are wide and open, with lakes, rock and distant snow. In summer, access to parts of this road is sometimes restricted to protect the area from heavy traffic. It is worth checking local information before you set out. The park changes with the season, and the weather can turn quickly at altitude.

The people who look after this place carry an old tradition. The park rangers are, in a sense, heirs of the royal gamekeepers. Their work has changed from protecting a king's hunt to protecting an entire ecosystem. They count animals, watch the glaciers, and keep the trails safe. If you meet a ranger on the path, they often know exactly where the ibex have been grazing that week.

Now look around you once more. Notice the colour of the rock, the line of the snow, the sound of water running somewhere below. Watch the slopes for anything that moves. An ibex standing still is easy to miss, because its coat matches the stone. As you walk on, keep your eyes on the ridgelines. The animals that saved this park may already be watching you.