Careri

In the local speech, which here is Calabrian Greek as well, the village is Harèri. Legend has it that it was born of an older town, Pandora, destroyed by an earthquake in 1507: the survivors scattered, and most of them settled where the village stands today, on the eastern flank of the Aspromonte. The fief passed from the Fedele of Bagnara to the Coscinà of Palmi and then, from 1767, to the Spinelli princes of Cariati, who under the French had to give up a good deal of demesne land.

In forty years Careri went up and down the administrative ladder four times. In 1799 the new order laid down by general Championnet put it in the canton of Roccella; in 1807 it was demoted to a luogo of the government of Ardore; in 1811 it was demoted again, to a village, that is to a hamlet of Benestare; and only twenty-five years later, by the decree of the eighteenth of July 1836, was it raised to an autonomous comune, with Natile joined to it. The earthquakes of 1783 and 1908 struck it hard, and so did the floods: the one of the eighteenth of October 1951 took ten lives, another came in 1973, and floods are still the great problem of this place. At La Guardia stands the monument to the dead of the wars.