The name of this place comes from the Arabic maqlub, which means overturning: here the ground turns itself inside out. They are mud volcanoes, cones a few dozen centimetres high from which liquid clay comes out, pushed by gas. The area has always been famous: Plato, Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder wrote about it, and in Roman times that mud was used to treat rheumatism.
What to see
A grey, bare landscape with no vegetation, which looks out of place in the middle of the Agrigento countryside. Legends are not lacking: one says the eruptions began in 1087 after a battle between Arabs and Normans, so much so that the greyish liquid was called the blood of the Saracens; another tells of a city swallowed by the earth for having offended a divinity.
Guy de Maupassant, who came through at the end of the nineteenth century, described them as «pustules of a terrible disease of nature». It is not a compliment, but it catches the effect this place has: it is not beautiful, it is unsettling, and that is why people have been talking about it for two and a half thousand years.
Visiting
The reserve has been closed to the public since 2014, when a mud explosion killed two children. You do not go in, and the closure must be respected to the letter: it is a decision taken after a tragedy, not bureaucratic excess. You can see the landscape from the edges, along the road.
Our editors' tip
It is worth understanding why it is dangerous. These are not volcanoes: the mud is cold, and what pushes it out is gas rising from underground. That means there is no thermal warning, no signal anyone can read, and that a cone quiet for years can erupt in a few seconds. It is unpredictability, not heat, that makes this ground a thing to look at from a distance.