canyon exploring with Michele Angileri

Vurganera - Coserie

We are in northeastern Sila, the so-called Sila Greca. Above the mountains are covered by the famous pine forests. Below the craggy mointainsides made of limestone and flysch flake and fill the valleys with huge amounts of debris which make one of the main features of calabrian landscape: the fiumare, deserts of stones meandering at the bottom of valleys.

By the villages of Mirto, Cropalati and Longobucco river Trionto gives travellers one of the most grand and beautiful landscape of "fiumara" existing in Calabria. Houses fields and roads are above, far from that hostile river-bed and from its furious floods. Above rise the villages of Destro and Manco, on the opposite sides of fiumara.

Destro is on a tight crest dividing Trionto from another smaller fiumara which flows parallelly and very near. It is Torrente Coserie, whose high part flows in the bottom of an easy and wild canyon, like its main tributary Torrente Vurganera.

I remember ...

My friend Pino, canyoneer and explorer, and I sometimes have different opinions on which streams are good for canyoning. It often happened for me to descend a stream Pino had estimated no interesting at all for canyoning, and find it instead so interesting to write a page about it on this website.

So when I read from Pino that Vurganera and Coserie was interesting "only for hikers, not canyoneers" I simply didn't believe him. But this time I have almost to agree with him. 80% of canyon of Vurganera-Coserie is suitable for hiking, because pools and little cascades are easy to bypass. In fact the most aware among calabrian hikers know this canyon and hike trhough it bottom-up, to return then on their steps. Pino did as calabrian hikers, following their tips.

Andrea and I chose a canyoning top-down approach with shuttle, instead. So we went through a part where hikers don't go. There we found a few nice cascades to rappel and some beautiful deep pools to swim in. And when we reached the part known to hikers we were wet and dressed to swim (Andrea has no need to wear a wetsuit, he's a kind of seal) and so we plunged and swam in a lot of emerald pools enclosed in canyon, the pools hikers bypass.

By doing as we did canyons of Vurganera and Coserie are a good funny canyoning trail, in my opinion. A trail to discover of a beautiful and almost unknown part of Sila Mounts.

Photos 5, 13, 18 by Andrea Pucci

Photographs in this website show ultralight ropes (6 mm ropes made of high tenacity fibers). Read multimedia book Ultralight ropes canyoning technique to learn how to use them.

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