This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)

The Local Natural Park of Monte Baldo covers a total area of 11.500 acres and was specifically created to protect its different habitats and species, involving sustainable development solutions and thorough respect of its environmental and economic features.

Featuring some glorious snow-capped peaks in winter, breath-taking views of Lake Garda in summer, wondrous flowering meadows in spring, and blazing-red beech woods in fall, the park was perfectly described, back in the 1500s, by the Italian pharmacist and botanist Francesco Calzolari as “…a huge variety of plants as in no other part of Italy”.
That very scholar set up a naturalistic museum right there, packing it with samples of animals, flowers, fossils, and rocks. In the same period, Gian Battista Olivi acknowledged Mount Baldo as “Hortus Italiae – the “Garden of Italy”, due to its extremely rich flora, which also includes many wild orchids and the recently found Brassica baldensis: the endemic cabbage species. There are also numerous amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals which thrive all over the park.

Today, scientists and scholars are constantly running some important research on the very medicinal plants which grow in this park, as well as many other local projects related to botany in general, geology and natural sciences.

THE WILD ORCHIDS:

Along the trails on the western slope of Mount Baldo Park, many species of orchids bloom in the spring, including Orchis simia, Limodorum abortivum, Ophrys bertolonii, Ophrys insectifera , and, in the driest areas, Orchis mori, Orchis tridentata, and Orchis militaris.

At the end of spring, visitors can admire Ophrys apifera, Ophrys holosericea, many specimens of Anacamptis pyramidalis, and, occasionally, some examples of Orchis purpurea.

On the eastern side of Mount Baldo, along the road that climbs to the Sanctuary of Spiazzi and Ferrara del Baldo, there are many other species, including .
Going further up, in the chestnut woods between Spiazzi and Ferrara, visitors can easily spot Neottia nidus-avis, Orchis mascula, and Platanthera bifolia. Then, there are also numberless specimens of Cephalanthera longifolia, and Cephalanthera damasonium.