Blue sails, the most beautiful sea in Sardinia, Calabria new entry – Green & Blue

These are the 21 seaside resorts that conquered the Five Sails of Legambiente and the Italian Touring Club. The blue guide “The most beautiful sea 2023” confirms the primacy of Sardinia, which is the most awarded region with 7 locations, starting from the first in the standings, Baunei, in the province of Nuoro. Followed by Tuscany with 4 localities; Puglia and Campania both with 3 and Sicily with 2. The classification is closed by Basilicata and Calabria, this year’s new entry, which reaches the top with Tropea. The Cinque Vele reward those who have been able to best combine territories and places of excellence with sustainable development strategies.
During the award ceremony, 9 plaques were also awarded for best coastal management practices. Among the themes at the center of this year’s analysis is the theme of congestion. The times of proximity holidays, discovered with the pandemic, seem to have already passed and we have returned to the situation of 2019 with too pressing and excessive situations in some coastal locations. In this field, the queen of seaside resorts, Baunei (Nu), has long since adopted the strategy of the “limited number”, called in a less “elitist” way with the expression “comfortable number”, to express a capacity limit that allows the right coexistence between the environment and the users of the same. Among the other Sardinian towns awarded with the Cinque Vele are Domus de Maria (Su), in the south of the island, Bosa (Or) and Cabras (Or), with the Marine Protected Area of ​​the Sinis Peninsula and the Island of Mal di Ventre, on the north-west coast and again Posada (Nu), Budoni (Ss) and Santa Teresa di Gallura (Ss) on the north-eastern stretch of coast. In Tuscany the Five Sails fly on the island of Capraia (Li) and, in Maremma, in Castiglione della Pescaia (Gr), the island of Giglio (Gr) and Capalbio (Gr). As for Puglia, Nardò (Le) is second in the general classification. Porto Cesareo (Le) is confirmed and Vieste (Fg) in the Gargano enters, awarded for the first time.
In Campania, along the Cilento coast, the Cinque Vele fly in Pollica-Acciaroli-Pioppi (Sa), third in the general classification, in San Giovanni a Piro (Sa) and in San Mauro Cilento (Sa). A little further south, in Basilicata, the municipality of Maratea (Pz) is also confirmed as Cinque Vele, while in Sicily the most coveted flag flies over two island municipalities, those of Pantelleria (Tp) and Santa Marina Salina (Me). “Our guide can be compared to a lighthouse in a port – declared during the press conference the president of Legambiente, Stefano Ciafani – a real point of reference to which political administrations, private stakeholders and citizens can and must turn to apply respectively new forms of management of these territories and new forms of tourism”. The guide is not “a ranking – says Franco Iseppi, President of the Italian Touring Club – but a geographical mapping that photographs the excellence of the Italian seas and lakes and an incentive to reflect on the extraordinary richness of the Italian natural and environmental heritage, on the pleasure of know it and the need to preserve it”.