On 27 December 2000 Gianfranco Lionetti spotted, on the shore of Lake San Giuliano, part of the fossil skeleton of a Pleistocene whale, originally some 27 metres long. In August 2006 a drop in the water level brought more of it to light; the excavation closed in 2011 and the bones, packed into custom-built wooden crates, set off for Matera. The lake that had kept them is not old: it was formed between 1950 and 1957 by damming the Bradano, an irrigation scheme paid for with Marshall Plan funds.
What to see
The birds arrived as soon as the water did, and they are the reason the reserve exists: about 180 species have been counted. Among the water birds are grey herons, little egrets, great crested grebes and coots; winter brings the great white egret, the cormorant, the pochard, the wigeon, the shelduck, the greylag goose and the rare ferruginous duck. Overhead pass the red kite and the black kite, the buzzard, the odd osprey; along the walls of the ravine you may see the Egyptian vulture. The tiny penduline tit is the emblem of the WWF oasis.
The lake covers 9.3 km² and holds about 100 million cubic metres of water behind a dam 38.3 metres high. The left bank, on the Matera side, slopes down flat; the right one, in the territories of Miglionico and Grottole, is more broken and drops more steeply. A belt of planted Aleppo pine, cypress and eucalyptus runs around it, and between the trees and the water, depending on how full the reservoir is, meadows appear that are flooded and emerge again. Below the dam the Bradano threads into a ravine up to 50 metres deep, part since 1991 of the Murgia Materana Park and so of the UNESCO list.
Visiting
You come in from the Lago San Giuliano junction on state road 7, about ten kilometres outside Matera. The reserve measures 1000 hectares across three municipalities, Matera, Miglionico and Grottole: it was created in 2000 by regional law and handed to the Province of Matera, while naturalistic management had already gone to the WWF in 1989. Since May 2003 it has been on the Italian list of wetlands under the Ramsar Convention. Winter is the season to pick, when the wintering birds come in.
Our editors' tip
End the day at the Domenico Ridola national archaeological museum in Matera: the lake's whale reached it in 2013, and since December 2022 part of the remains, including the right humerus and the tympanic bulla, can be seen in the display called “Giuliana degli Abissi”. After walking the shore it came out of, the case looks different.