This park protects the largest mountain pine forest in the Aosta Valley: nearly a thousand hectares of a tree that elsewhere, at the edge of the woods, is little more than a shrub and here instead makes a real forest. The reason lies underfoot, in the green rocks the whole valley is made of.
What to see
They are ophiolites, ancient ocean floors lifted by the collision that built the Alps: they give poor soils loaded with metals, where very few plants hold out and the mountain pine instead thrives. The same rocks explain the other thing you meet along the paths, the remains of the mines that worked here for centuries.
The park was created in 1989, the first regional park of the valley after the Gran Paradiso, and it stretches over five thousand hectares between the Champdepraz valley and the Champorcher valley, far from the region's main tourist routes. There are high lakes, among them the largest natural lake of the valley, and peaks that pass three thousand metres by a little.
Visiting
You go in from the villages at the valley bottom, above all from Champdepraz; access is free and without hours, but at altitude the snow stays into high summer and walks need preparing. A full day for the classic crossing.
Our editors' tip
Do not aim at a summit at all costs: go into the pine wood and walk inside it for a couple of hours. Crossing a mountain pine forest is something you can do in very few places in Italy, and these are low, twisted trees that grow extremely slowly. Some of those you pass are older than the park by several generations.