The area

For a century and a half this part of Sicily lived on sulphur. The nineteenth-century mines at Gabara — Persico, Giunta, the San Michele shaft — are what remains of that world: inclined tunnels, shafts, smelting furnaces, and the original steps the carusi climbed with ore on their shoulders. For decades they were ruins nobody talked about. Today they are an open-air museum.

The shift is recent and documented. In 2023 the park joined ISPRA's National Network of Italian Mining Parks and Museums. The Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Catania brings placements, internships and experimental theses here: the site is to all intents an open-air university laboratory. Thirty-two interpretation panels guide three distinct routes — scientific, anthropological, literary.

The literary route has a precise reason. Inside the park stands an installation titled "Ciàula scopre la Luna", after Pirandello's story set in a Sicilian sulphur mine. Beside it, "Volumi Liquidi" by Vincenzo Barba and "L'equilibrio della Terra" by Franco Politano. Theatre monologues and mime performances are staged in the wood, and along the Via dei Frati stands Big Bench number 399 of the Big Bench Community Project — the ones walkers collect as they cross Italy.

The municipality plans to upgrade the road climbing from the Calvario at San Cataldo, with a cycle path as far as the entrance to the wood. The park is part of the "Gemme di Sicilia" project, which links San Cataldo, Caltanissetta, Serradifalco and Delia. This is slow tourism: school parties, university groups, walkers, cyclists. People who arrive in the morning and look for somewhere to eat and somewhere to stay.

Vassallaggi occupies five hills in the middle Salso valley, at around 700 metres. The settlement reached its height from the seventh century BC, when it became an outpost in a position that mattered: the passage between northern and southern Sicily. Stretches of walls, houses, the urban layout, necropolises and places of worship remain.

The site is managed by the Gela Archaeological Park. It is the kind of place that draws a specific public — schools, university groups, archaeologists, travellers moving along the routes of inland Sicily — and that, once fully open, generates demand for food and accommodation within a few kilometres.

!As checked in August 2026, the archaeological area is temporarily closed for maintenance and safety works. Before counting on it as an attraction already open to visitors, it is worth asking the Gela Archaeological Park about reopening.

Lago Soprano formed in the early twentieth century when surface rock banks collapsed, through water erosion on limestone. It is shallow — two metres at most — and small: fifteen hectares. A nature reserve since 2000, it lies about nine hundred and fifty metres from the centre of Serradifalco.

Reed warblers, sedge warblers and little bitterns nest among the reeds, and in winter the lake hosts hundreds of wintering ducks. A six-kilometre loop runs around it. This is where birdwatchers and nature photographers go, a public that travels out of season and at weekends — precisely when a hospitality business most needs to fill.

The aerial views show it without need of comment: the vine rows and olive groves border the former pitch and surround the estate on several sides. San Cataldo sits at 625 metres, in an inland hill area where vines and olives are the very structure of the landscape.

One clarification worth making, because it matters in a negotiation: the Riesi DOC designation covers the territories of Riesi, Butera and Mazzarino, not those of San Cataldo and Serradifalco. No appellation is claimed here. What is claimed is something more concrete and visible to the eye: the raw material is grown a few hundred metres away, and for a restaurant or a covered market that means suppliers within walking distance.