The name says where the village is: Parghelia comes from the Greek pará hélios, in front of the sun, and the borgo by the sea was called Paralìa, which in Greek is the beach, the shore. The coat of arms repeats the same thing without words: two towers reflected in the sea and, above them, a golden sun. We are on the coast of the Gods, between Tropea and capo Vaticano, on a terrace looking out over the Tyrrhenian with the beaches below and the houses above; the comune also takes in the hamlet of Fitili, which has its feast on 30 September, for saint Jerome. The rest of this coast everybody knows; here, instead, people come for the position, which is the one the name was already describing in Greek.
The village you see today, though, is almost all new: the earthquake of 1905 razed it to the ground, and the rebuilding came in the twenties. Of what stood before, one thing only held: the church of the Madonna di Portosalvo, which stayed up while everything around it came down; its feast is the second Sunday of August. The strangest custom, instead, belongs to autumn and concerns the other church, that of Saint Andrew the apostle, who is the patron: on 29 November, on the eve of his feast, chestnuts are thrown from the bell tower onto the people standing below in the square. The next day, the thirtieth, comes the procession.
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📅 Every year, on 30 November
On 30 November Parghelia celebrates its patron Saint Andrew the Apostle; the day before, the town holds the traditional chestnut throwing from the bell tower.
Sweet enough to go into ice cream, grown along a strip of Tyrrhenian coast: Cipolla Rossa di Tropea Calabria has held Protected Geographical Indication status since 2008.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Parghelia, but an easy day trip away.
