What to see · Cesano Maderno

More places of interest

• Parco delle Groane

  The Parco regionale delle Groane e della Brughiera Briantea is a protected area of the upper Lombard plain, north-west of Milan. It was set up in 1976, under the name Parco delle Groane, at the wish of the municipalities and the Region; the name comes from the word used here for heathland, the groane. It covers more than eight thousand hectares, in twenty-eight municipalities of three provinces, and Cesano Maderno is one of them. Since 21 December 2017 it has also included the Brughiera Briantea park and the Fontana del Guercio nature reserve.

  What to see

  The vegetation is of three kinds: oak woods, pine woods and heath. The heath is a grassy expanse marked by heather, a plant of acid soils, and it is a transitional environment: it arises where a wood has been destroyed by felling, grazing or fire, then becomes covered with birches, aspens and Scots pines and in a few decades turns into pine wood. The Scots pine was planted on a large scale in the eighteenth century, under the Austrians, to reforest the clay soils; once the care was abandoned, the pine woods slowly turned into oak woods of pedunculate and sessile oak. Woods occupy about a quarter of the park, the rest is mostly farmland.

  For somewhere on the edge of a metropolis, the wildlife is fairly rich. In the ponds live the Italian crested newt, the tree frog, the Italian agile frog and the fire salamander; among the birds are the green woodpecker, the great spotted woodpecker, the kestrel, the buzzard, the sparrowhawk and the long-eared owl. The red squirrel was reintroduced by the park authority in the eighties in the woods of Cesate and Solaro, and the fox is very numerous. The park also contains sites of historical value and industrial archaeology.

  Visiting

  The park is explored on paths: access points, routes and rules should be checked on the park authority's website.

  Our editors' tip

  In Cesano Maderno there is a Lipu oasis, and the American pond slider still lives there. It is one of the reasons why the European pond turtle has vanished from the park: present until the eighties, it is now considered extinct in this area, hit by pollution, the shrinking of its habitat and competition from the species that came from outside.

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