Sardinia: European Forest Island Award 0 Comments

Sardinia: European Forest Island Award

The Gabbiano Azzurro Hotel & Suites has always identified in Sardinia’s forest and woods heritage an integration to the sea for the promotion of its tourist-recreational offer.

We are therefore proud to acquire that this year the European Forest Island Award was conferred to Sardinia by the European Forest Institute (EFI), which recognized the value of the natural heritage of the island. Presented on  Monday, March 19, 2018 in Nuoro, the successful environmental policies, attentive to the needs and to the specificity of the Sardinian territory and protecting the Mediterranean silviculture, were rewarded.

The European Forest Institute is an international organisation, established by 28 European States. EFI conducts and promotes research and provides policy support on forests and woods related issues. Sardinia promotes a forest and forest heritage among the greenest in Italy, the pride of the Sardinian people, which over the centuries have always tried to protect their natural lungs from deforestation. The damage caused by fires seems to have been dammed and trees and bushes are in good health, as the State Forestry Corps informs, recalling that Sardinia has a patrimony of woods and forests of about 1,250,000 hectares.

Furthermore, the woods and forests Sardinia has also protected the local fauna patrimony. In fact, a careful policy of resettlement is making sure that species at risk of extinction, as mouflons, bucks and Sardinian deer  are constantly repopulating.

It is correct to recall the collaboration of the Sardinian rural police forces called "Compagnia Barracellare" in the forest and woods conservation of Sardinia. The barracello (barratzellu or barracellu in Sardinian), in uniform and with a rifle on his shoulder, has the task of patrolling the countryside, participating in the program of prevention and suppression of fires on the island and assisting the carabinieri, the Civil Protection as well as the Forestry Corps. Compagnia Barracellare is the oldest police force in Europe and is an institution of the Sardinian Autonomous Region.

The Compagnia Barracellare is of ancient origin, was created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the time of the Judges, (the Barracelli were in fact called juratos or jurados de logu), when a special country guard was established which, paid by the breeders, patrolled the territory to protect it from theft, from bandits, from fires, from vandalism, from unpunished trespassing of livestock, the barincellos or justitia de campana. It was in 1570, under the Aragonesi, that they took the name of Barracelli, a title they still currently keep.
It is the green Sardinia of the woods and forests, scarcely known by the majority of visitors, that with great pleasure the Gabbiano Azzurro Hotel & Suites wants you to discover.

"It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit." (Robert Louis Stevenson)

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Written by Daniela Toti

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