Cultural and historical differences in hiking infrastructure between Spain and southern Italy AI-pedia

Spain and southern Italy have a lot in common. Both are mountainous Mediterranean regions with long histories of rural poverty, pastoralism and emigration, and both now receive large numbers of foreign tourists. Their hiking infrastructure, however, is very different. "Hiking infrastructure" here means waymarked paths, signposts, maps, mountain huts, trail catalogues, and the organisations and budgets that maintain them. Spain, especially its northern regions, has a dense and largely standardised network of waymarked trails, a strong club culture and heavy public investment. Southern Italy, often called the Mezzogiorno, has outstanding landscapes, but its trail network is generally described as patchier, less well signed and less well maintained.

The usual explanations are historical and cultural rather than geographical. In Spain, organised walking became part of civic and regional identity from the late nineteenth century. This was most marked in Catalonia, where the excursionisme movement was tied to the Catalan cultural revival. Later, the revival of the Camino de Santiago and the decentralisation of government after 1978 gave walking a large place in public policy. In southern Italy, organised mountaineering arrived mainly through the Club Alpino Italiano. The club was founded in the north and focused on the Alps. In the South, mountains stayed associated with poverty, banditry and depopulation, and tourism policy concentrated on the coast.

These explanations are broad generalisations. Both countries contain large internal differences. There are well-run trail networks in parts of southern Italy and poorly maintained ones in parts of Spain. Since the 2010s, walking routes in the Italian South have also grown quickly.

Scope and terminology

In this article, "southern Italy" means the mainland regions of Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, Apulia and Molise, together with Sicily. Abruzzo is sometimes included in the Mezzogiorno for historical and statistical purposes and is mentioned where relevant. Sardinia is usually treated separately and is only mentioned in passing. "Spain" means the whole country, although the differences inside Spain are large and are discussed below.

Several terms appear throughout:

• Senderismo (Spanish) and escursionismo (Italian) both mean recreational walking on paths, as distinct from technical mountaineering (alpinismo).
• Excursionisme (Catalan) is the Catalan movement of organised excursions. It combined walking with the study of landscape, history, folklore and natural science.
• Waymarking means painting or fixing standard marks along a path so that walkers can follow it.
• Homologation (homologación) is the formal process by which a Spanish mountain federation checks that a path meets agreed standards before it can carry an official GR, PR or SL mark.
• Rifugio (Italian) and refugio (Spanish) mean a mountain hut. A hut may be staffed and serve meals, or it may be unstaffed and offer basic shelter only.

Historical background in Spain

Catalan excursionisme

The roots of organised walking in Spain are usually traced to Catalonia in the 1870s. The Associació Catalanista d'Excursions Científiques was founded in Barcelona in 1876. A rival body, the Associació d'Excursions Catalana, followed shortly afterwards. The two merged in 1891 to form the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (CEC), which still exists.

These organisations were not simply sports clubs. They belonged to the Renaixença, the nineteenth-century revival of Catalan language, literature and identity. Members walked in order to know the country. They recorded Romanesque churches, place names, folk songs and plants, and published bulletins and guides. Walking the land was understood as a way of claiming it culturally. The priest-poet Jacint Verdaguer, whose epic poem Canigó (1886) is set in the Pyrenees, was closely linked with this milieu.

Over the following decades, local centres excursionistes spread to towns across Catalonia. They had a broad middle-class and, later, working-class membership. They organised outings, ran mountain huts, published maps and kept a tradition of collective walking alive through political upheavals, including the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Under Franco, open expressions of Catalan identity were restricted, and the clubs became one of the spaces where Catalan cultural life could continue.

The Basque Country and Madrid

A similar link between mountains and regional identity developed in the Basque Country. There, a strong mendizale (mountain-goer) culture grew up in the early twentieth century, with clubs in many towns and a tradition of climbing local summits. Some of these clubs had links with Basque nationalism.

In Madrid, the movement had a different origin. The Institución Libre de Enseñanza was a progressive, secular educational institution founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos and others. It promoted excursions into the Sierra de Guadarrama as part of education, on the view that contact with nature and landscape formed character and citizenship. The Sociedad de Alpinismo Peñalara, founded in 1913, continued this tradition. The Guadarrama became a weekend walking area for Madrid's middle classes and gained national park status in 2013.

At national level, the Spanish mountaineering federation, today the Federación Española de Deportes de Montaña y Escalada (FEDME), was established in the 1920s. It later became central to the waymarking system.

National parks

Spain's first national parks were created in 1918 under a 1916 law. The law was promoted by the Asturian politician and mountaineer Pedro Pidal. The first two parks were the Montaña de Covadonga, now part of the Picos de Europa National Park, and Ordesa, now Ordesa y Monte Perdido. Both are in northern mountain areas and both became major walking destinations. Spain had sixteen national parks as of the early 2020s, the most recent being Sierra de las Nieves in Andalusia (2021). Alongside these are many regional natural parks managed by the autonomous communities.

The Camino de Santiago revival

The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela dates from the Middle Ages but had declined greatly by the twentieth century. Its revival from the 1970s and especially the 1980s is one of the most important events in the history of long-distance walking in Europe. Volunteers began marking the route. Elías Valiña, the parish priest of O Cebreiro in Galicia, is widely credited with popularising the yellow arrows that now guide pilgrims.

In 1987 the Council of Europe declared the Camino the first European Cultural Route. In 1993 the Camino Francés in Spain was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the inscription was later extended to the northern routes. The Galician regional government used the Holy Years, beginning with 1993, as major promotional campaigns under the name Xacobeo.

The number of people registered as completing the pilgrimage rose from a few thousand a year in the 1980s to several hundred thousand a year by the 2010s and 2020s. The Pilgrim's Office in Santiago recorded more than 400,000 in 2023. The Camino made multi-day walking from village to village ordinary for many Spaniards and foreigners. It also created a model of hostels (albergues), signage and services along a walking route.

The GR, PR and SL network

From the 1970s, Spanish mountain federations adopted the French system of grande randonnée paths. Spain's first GR routes were marked in Catalonia. The system grew into three categories, each with its own colour code:

• GR (Gran Recorrido, long-distance paths): white and red marks. These are generally multi-day routes of more than 50 km. Well-known examples include the GR 11 (Senda Pirenaica), which crosses the Spanish side of the Pyrenees from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and the GR 7, part of the European long-distance path E4.
• PR (Pequeño Recorrido, short-distance paths): white and yellow marks. These are usually routes that can be walked in a day.
• SL (Sendero Local, local paths): white and green marks. These are short paths of a few kilometres.

FEDME holds the registered trademarks for these marks. Regional mountain federations carry out the homologation, checking that a path is safe, continuous, correctly marked and documented. Homologation does not last forever, and paths that are not maintained can lose their status. The system gives walkers a single, recognisable visual language across the country.

Spain also developed MIDE (Método de Información de Excursiones), a standardised way of rating the difficulty of walking routes, in Aragon in the early 2000s. It is now used in several regions.

Decentralisation and public money

The 1978 Constitution created the autonomous communities. These regional governments took on powers over tourism, environment, sport and land planning. Many of them, especially Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Asturias, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands and Andalusia, invested in walking routes as a way of promoting rural tourism and slowing depopulation. Some passed regulations or created official catalogues of paths.

From the late 1980s onwards, European Union funds, including the LEADER rural development programme launched in 1991, paid for many waymarking projects, interpretive panels and restorations of old paths.

Greenways and drove roads

Two other Spanish programmes add to the network:

• Vías Verdes (greenways): since 1993, a national programme coordinated by the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles has converted disused railway lines into walking and cycling routes. The network now amounts to several thousand kilometres.
• Vías pecuarias (drove roads): Spain inherited a large network of transhumance routes, the cañadas reales and smaller drove roads. Many were historically linked to the Mesta, the medieval association of livestock owners. A 1995 national law (Law 3/1995) confirmed these routes as public property. It allows compatible uses such as walking, which gives Spain a legally protected corridor network that can serve walkers.

Historical background in southern Italy

Unification, banditry and the "Southern Question"

The unification of Italy (1859–1861) absorbed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into a state centred on the north. In the 1860s, the mountainous interior of the South was the scene of the brigantaggio. This was a widespread armed revolt and banditry that the new state suppressed by military means. For decades afterwards, the inland mountains were associated in official and popular imagination with lawlessness, poverty and backwardness, not with leisure.

The questione meridionale ("Southern Question") is the long debate about why the South remained economically behind the North. It framed the interior mainly as a problem of development. Large-scale emigration, first to the Americas and later to northern Italy and northern Europe, emptied many mountain villages from the late nineteenth century onwards.

The economist Manlio Rossi-Doria described southern Italy as made up of la polpa e l'osso, "the flesh and the bone". The "flesh" was the fertile coastal plains, and the "bone" was the poor, mountainous interior. Carlo Levi's book Cristo si è fermato a Eboli ("Christ Stopped at Eboli", 1945), about his internal exile in Lucania (Basilicata), gave a famous literary image of that interior as isolated and forgotten.

Walking as necessity rather than leisure

In the southern interior, people did walk a great deal: shepherds on transhumance routes, farmers going to distant fields, and pilgrims to rural sanctuaries. Mule tracks (mulattiere) and drove roads (tratturi) connected villages. This walking was tied to work, poverty and religious duty.

When roads and motor vehicles arrived in the twentieth century, many of these paths fell out of use. Walking for pleasure was often seen as something done by outsiders or the urban well-off. It was not something a rural family that had recently escaped hardship would choose to do. This is the cultural pattern most often mentioned when explaining the weaker hiking culture of the South.

The Club Alpino Italiano and its northern centre of gravity

The Club Alpino Italiano (CAI) was founded in Turin in 1863, with the statesman Quintino Sella among its founders. Its early identity was tied to the Alps, to scientific exploration and to the patriotic project of the new Italian state. Its membership, its huts (rifugi) and its maintenance work remained concentrated in the north, where the Alps offered high mountains and a strong tradition of mountain guides.

The CAI did establish sections in the South. The Naples section dates from the nineteenth century, and sections exist today throughout the southern regions. Their membership and resources, however, have generally been much smaller than those of northern sections. In the CAI model, path maintenance relies heavily on volunteers. In regions with fewer members, fewer paths are maintained.

The South also has relatively few staffed mountain huts compared with the Alps or the Spanish Pyrenees. This makes multi-day routes harder to organise.

Tourism policy focused on the coast

After the Second World War, state development policy for the South, carried out notably through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (1950–1984), concentrated on agrarian reform, roads, water and industry. Mass tourism that developed from the 1950s and 1960s was mainly seaside tourism: the Amalfi Coast, the Sorrento peninsula, the Gargano, Salento, the Calabrian coasts and Sicily.

Regional and local governments generally saw coastal tourism as the main source of visitor income. The mountain interior received far less tourism investment. Critics describe mountain trails as having been an afterthought in regional planning. Supporters of the regional governments point to limited budgets and more urgent problems, such as landslides, depopulation and basic services.

An older tradition of visitors to the mountains

The story is not entirely one of absence. Grand Tour travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regularly climbed Vesuvius and Etna. A funicular railway on Vesuvius opened in 1880 and inspired the song "Funiculì, Funiculà". Naples had an educated bourgeoisie, and the Amalfi Coast had well-known footpaths, such as the route now marketed as the Sentiero degli Dei ("Path of the Gods"). These traditions, however, did not grow into a broad, organised walking movement comparable to Catalan excursionisme.

National parks

Most southern Italian national parks are relatively recent. Many were created under a framework law on protected areas passed in 1991. They include:

• Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni (Campania)
• Vesuvius (Campania)
• Gargano (Apulia)
• Alta Murgia (Apulia)
• Pollino (Basilicata and Calabria), the largest national park in Italy
• Appennino Lucano–Val d'Agri–Lagonegrese (Basilicata)
• Sila (Calabria)
• Aspromonte (Calabria)

Mount Etna in Sicily is protected as a regional park and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2013. Further north, the Abruzzo National Park dates from the 1920s and is among Italy's oldest.

The parks have created path networks, visitor centres and maps. The quality of maintenance and signage varies greatly from park to park and over time, often depending on funding cycles and on how stable park management is.

How the trail systems compare

Waymarking and standards

In Spain, the GR/PR/SL system is run through the federations. Regional governments often require homologation for paths to receive public funds or to appear in official catalogues. This produces a fairly uniform appearance across regions, although actual maintenance varies.

In Italy, the CAI standard is the most widespread. It uses red-and-white painted marks, numbered paths and signposts showing walking times, and it rates paths with difficulty grades such as T (turistico), E (escursionistico) and EE (escursionisti esperti). The CAI maintains a national path register, the Rete Escursionistica Italiana. Other organisations, parks and municipalities sometimes use their own marks, and long-distance pilgrimage routes (cammini) often have their own symbols. In the South, a walker may therefore meet several marking systems, or none, on the same mountain.

Who maintains the paths

In Spain, maintenance is a mixture of club volunteers, regional government crews, park staff and contractors paid from public or EU funds. In Italy, CAI volunteers do much of the waymarking and clearing, supplemented by parks, mountain communities and municipalities. In southern regions with fewer volunteers and weaker local finances, paths can become overgrown quickly.

Several natural factors make this worse in both countries, but especially in the South:

• Mediterranean scrub (macchia) grows back fast.
• Wildfires destroy signs and vegetation.
• Landslides are frequent in the clay hills of Basilicata and Calabria.

Long-distance routes

Spain's long-distance walking is dominated by the Camino de Santiago and the GR network, both well served by accommodation along the way. Italy's national long-distance path, the Sentiero Italia, was proposed in the early 1980s by a group of journalists and walkers. It was later taken over by the CAI and relaunched in 2019 as the Sentiero Italia CAI. It is a route of several thousand kilometres running through the Apennines, Sicily, Sardinia and the Alps.

The southern sections, for example through Pollino and Aspromonte, cross some of the wildest country in Italy. Walkers have often reported gaps in marking and in accommodation on these sections, although the relaunch included work to improve them.

Comparison table

Aspect	Spain	Southern Italy
Origins of organised walking	Catalan and Basque clubs, Madrid educational movement, from the 1870s	CAI sections from the nineteenth century, small compared with the north
Cultural meaning of walking	Linked to regional identity, education and leisure	Historically linked to work, poverty and pilgrimage
Main marking system	GR / PR / SL, homologated by federations	CAI red-and-white, plus park and route-specific marks
Flagship long-distance route	Camino de Santiago; GR 11 across the Pyrenees	Sentiero Italia CAI; southern cammini such as the Via Francigena in the South
Public funding	Strong role of autonomous communities since 1978; EU funds	Mainly parks and EU funds; regional priority on coastal tourism
Mountain huts	Network of staffed huts in Pyrenees, Picos de Europa, Sierra Nevada	Relatively few staffed huts
Legal protection of old routes	Drove roads protected as public property (1995 law)	Tratturi partly protected, especially in Molise and Apulia; many old mule tracks unregistered

Internal differences

Within Spain

Spain is not uniform. Catalonia, the Basque Country, Navarre, Aragon, Asturias and the Madrid region have the strongest club traditions. The south of Spain shows that a southern, historically poor region can still develop dense walking infrastructure. Andalusia has invested heavily in natural parks and paths, in the Sierra Nevada, the Alpujarra, the Sierra de Grazalema and elsewhere. The Caminito del Rey, a restored cliff walkway near Málaga, reopened in 2015 and became a major attraction. This comparison is often used to argue that regional policy and money matter at least as much as historical culture.

At the same time, Spanish walkers often complain that some PR and SL paths were marked once with grant money and then left without maintenance, and that homologation records do not always reflect conditions on the ground.

Within southern Italy

Some parts of southern Italy are well walked. These include the Amalfi Coast and Sorrento peninsula, Etna, the Aeolian Islands, Vesuvius, and parts of the Cilento and Pollino. Local associations, mountain guides and some CAI sections are very active. Other areas, especially inland Calabria, Molise and parts of Basilicata and Sicily, have little waymarking, few maps and few services for walkers.

Recent developments

The growth of cammini in Italy

Since the 2010s, Italy has seen rapid growth in cammini: long-distance walking routes, often with a religious, historical or cultural theme and inspired partly by the success of the Camino de Santiago. The Italian Ministry of Culture declared 2016 the "Year of the Cammini" and began compiling a national atlas of such routes.

In the South, examples include:

• The southern extension of the Via Francigena through Campania, Basilicata and Apulia towards the ports of the Adriatic and Santa Maria di Leuca.
• The Magna Via Francigena in Sicily, between Palermo and Agrigento.
• Renewed interest in walking the ancient Via Appia, encouraged in part by the journalist Paolo Rumiz, who walked it in the mid-2010s and wrote a book about it.
• Various regional routes in Calabria and Basilicata.

Many of these cammini are promoted by associations and municipalities as a way of bringing visitors and income to depopulated inland villages. In this way they mirror the earlier Spanish use of walking routes against rural decline.

Transhumance heritage

Both countries have tried to give new value to old pastoral routes. In southern Italy, the network of tratturi, such as the Tratturo Magno between L'Aquila and Foggia, is a recognised historic heritage. Transhumance was added to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019, in a joint nomination by Italy, Greece and Austria. Turning tratturi into continuous walking routes, however, has been slow, because many sections have been built over, ploughed or absorbed into roads. Spain's 1995 law on drove roads gives it a stronger legal basis for such reuse, although encroachment is also a problem there.

Digital mapping

Apps and open mapping projects such as OpenStreetMap, together with user-generated route sites, have partly filled gaps in official information in both countries. In southern Italy this has made some unmarked or poorly marked areas more accessible to experienced walkers. It has also raised safety concerns when routes shown online no longer exist on the ground.

Debates and open questions

• Culture or money? One view stresses deep cultural history: a civic walking tradition in Spain and the association of mountains with hardship in the Italian South. Another view stresses institutions and funding: Spain's autonomous communities had both the powers and the motive to invest, while southern Italian regions faced weaker finances and other priorities. The example of Andalusia is often cited in support of the second view. Most commentators accept that both factors play a part.
• Is the "no leisure culture" claim fair? It is sometimes said that southern Italy never had a middle-class outdoor leisure boom. This is broadly accurate as a comparison with Catalonia, but it is an overstatement if taken literally. Naples, Palermo and other cities had educated urban classes, CAI sections and a long history of visitors climbing volcanoes and walking coastal paths. The difference is one of scale and continuity rather than complete absence.
• Volunteer versus public models. The CAI's volunteer model is praised for local knowledge and commitment. It is also criticised because it ties path quality to the number of active members in a given area. Some argue that the South needs more professional, publicly funded maintenance. Others warn that grant-funded marking without long-term maintenance, a known problem in parts of Spain, does not solve the issue either.
• Tourism and its side effects. Increased walking tourism can bring income to depopulated areas. Experience on the Camino and on popular trails such as the Sentiero degli Dei shows that it can also bring crowding, erosion and pressure on small communities. How to balance promotion with protection is an open question in both countries.
• Lack of comparable data. There is no single, reliable comparison of the total length, density or condition of waymarked paths in Spain and southern Italy. Definitions, registers and counting methods differ. Many statements about the gap, including those in this article, are therefore qualitative rather than precisely measured.

See also

• Excursionisme
• Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
• Club Alpino Italiano
• Federación Española de Deportes de Montaña y Escalada
• Camino de Santiago
• GR footpath
• Sentiero Italia
• Via Francigena
• Vías Verdes
• Cañada Real
• Tratturo
• Southern Question
• Pollino National Park
• Mount Etna
• Institución Libre de Enseñanza