Coast of western Sicily

San Vito Lo Capo

An area to discover

Besides the beach, San Vito Lo Capo is a territory of paths, cliffs, caves and coastal villages. Monte Monaco looks down on the town; the Sanctuary tells its origins; the lighthouse marks the point where the land opens to the Mediterranean.

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The identity of the place

A story to live

The route begins around the Sanctuary-fortress and continues along streets born of devotion and life at sea. From here you can choose the perspective of the mountain, the cliffs or the coast of Macari and Castelluzzo. The lighthouse ideally closes the story.

To experience

Experiences to enjoy

Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

Cous Cous Fest and the Couscous Houses

The highest and most international point of this story: a festival born to make cooking an instrument of peace, which every year turns San Vito Lo Capo into the world capital of couscous. The new document widens the food thread to rockfish soup, the wild herbs of Macari and Castelluzzo and the traditional caldo-freddo.

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Sentiero sulla costa sopra la cala dell’Isulidda a Macari

Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

Macari: Sunset Walk Among Coves and Viewpoints

A guided walk in the Macari area among viewpoints, coves and sunset colours.

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Mani che lavorano la semola nel tegame di terracotta per il cous cous

Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

San Vito Lo Capo: Trapani Couscous Workshop

A hands-on lesson dedicated to the incocciatura of semolina, fish broth and the gestures of Trapani cooking.

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Cala dai ciottoli bianchi e acqua turchese sulla costa di San Vito Lo Capo

Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

San Vito Lo Capo: Zingaro and Scopello by Boat with Lunch

A day by boat along the Zingaro coast with stops in the coves and a pass in front of the Scopello sea stacks.

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Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

Couscous School

A direct experience with the keepers of this tradition: local women who teach, gesture after gesture, how to roll the semolina according to the recipe handed down from generation to generation. The new story links this gesture to the rockfish soup and the scents of the coast, showing how semolina becomes the food story of San Vito.

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Experience • San Vito Lo Capo

Tonnara del Secco

Active from 1412 to 1969, today it is a place suspended in time: Punic cetariae tanks, abandoned stone buildings and a silence that the FAI recognised as a place of the heart in 2017. The natural close of the story of bluefin tuna in Sicily. In the new story the stop becomes part of a wider route among Monte Monaco, cliffs, caves and the Lighthouse, showing San Vito beyond the beach.

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To experience

Places of interest

Place

Caldo Freddo

A delicacy of artisan ice cream shops, the Caldo Freddo (“hot-cold”) owes its name to the sublime mix of cold ingredients (the ice cream) and hot ones (the dark chocolate covering the composition).

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Place

Chapel of Saint Crescentia

The small, evocative building with a square plan and a raised-arch dome, opened by pointed arches, is an original example of architecture typical of Trapani of the late fifteenth–early sixteenth century, with Arab, Norman and Gothic influences. Particular is the solution of the dome’s corner supports with…

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Place

Couscous

Of Arab origin, Trapani couscous is strictly fish-based.

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Place

Feast of San Vito

The town dedicates solemn celebrations to its patron Saint, from 13 to 15 June.

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Place

Grotta dell’Uzzo

Located inside the Zingaro Reserve, it is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the whole of Sicily, where the stratification found has made it possible to learn about the evolution of man over the last 10,000 years.

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Place

Cala Mancina Caves

The western part of the San Vito Lo Capo promontory keeps, in an evocative natural setting, a complex of caves of prehistoric interest ranging from the Grotta Perciata to those of the Racchio and the Isulidda, to the caves of Cala Mancina, the Ciaravelli and the Horses.

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Place

The Sanctuary of San Vito Lo Capo

The Sanctuary–Fortress of San Vito Lo Capo was almost certainly built in the fifteenth century to protect pilgrims from pirate raids, incorporating the structures of a pre-existing church, documented in the fourteenth century; the restorations of 2003, which gave the church back its original orientation…

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Place

Zingaro Nature Reserve

The Zingaro Nature Reserve stretches between Castellammare del Golfo and San Vito Lo Capo. Established in the early 1980s, it is the first nature reserve in Sicily, in an area rich in evergreen Mediterranean scrub with coves characterised by an intense blue and crystal-clear sea…

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Place

Santa Elisabetta Beaches

For those who love discovering secluded little beaches, away from the crowds, between Castelluzzo and Makari lies the complex of beaches and inlets called Baia Santa Margherita.

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Place

San Vito Lo Capo Beach

“The most beautiful beach in Italy” is dominated and protected by Monte Monaco to the east and lapped by the Egitarso Plain to the west; a symbol of holiday and relaxation, it is certainly among the most beautiful and loved in Italy, above all for its setting of extraordinary beauty: the unmatched colours in which it is immersed, the white of the low houses covered in fragrant climbers, the green of the parched Mediterranean vegetation, the grey-brown of the soils and rocks…

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Place

Tonnara del Secco

The land-based tuna trap, now disused, was a structure serving the sea tuna trap, with storehouses for keeping the nets, shelters for the boats and buildings to lodge the crews, as well as a plant for processing tuna.

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Place

Torre ‘Mpisu

The Torre ‘Mpisu (or ‘Impisu, “hanged man”) (original name “Jazzolino”), together with the other coastal towers in the territory of San Vito Lo Capo, was built in 1583 by the Florentine architect Camillo Camilliani, commissioned by the Viceroy of the time to organise the island’s coastal defences…

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Place

Torre Isulidda

Torre Isulidda is one of the coastal watchtowers, part of the circuit designed in 1583 by the Florentine architect Camillo Camilliani, who was entrusted with building a system of towers to defend against the pirates that infested the Mediterranean causing massacres,…

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Place

Torre Sciere

The Torre dell’Usciere, called Sciere, together with the other two in the municipal territory, called M’pisu and dell’Isulidda, was part of the coastal watchtowers, included in the island circuit designed in 1583 by the Florentine architect Camillo Camilliani, who was entrusted with the…

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Itineraries across the area

The Trapani Couscous Itinerary

Custonaci, Erice, Favignana, Marsala, Mazara del Vallo, Misiliscemi, Paceco, Pantelleria, Petrosino, San Vito Lo Capo, Trapani, Valderice

In 2020 UNESCO inscribed Maghreb couscous on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But on this coast couscous has an older and more intimate story: it arrived with the sailors and workers who, between Mazara del Vallo and San Vito Lo Capo, traded for centuries with the Tunisian coasts…

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The Tuna and Tuna Traps Itinerary

Custonaci, Favignana, San Vito Lo Capo, Trapani, Valderice

Every spring, for centuries, tuna crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to enter the Mediterranean to spawn, and the Trapani coast awaited them with a system of nets, rituals and whole communities built around a single event: the mattanza. In Favignana this relationship reached its…

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Where to stay

Stay • San Vito Lo Capo

B&B Al Cantuccio

B&B

In Castelluzzo, on the north-western coast of the province of Trapani, the building that houses B&B Al Cantuccio is very recently built. Immersed in nature among the olive trees that characterise this area of western Sicily, it has large outdoor spaces that guests can use for relaxing moments…

via Luigi Pirandello 14/a – 91010 Castelluzzo, San Vito Lo Capo (TP)

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Stay • San Vito Lo Capo

Ghibli Hotel

Hotel

Ghibli, in Arabic Quiblì, is the desert wind, hot and laden with sand: it is the wind of the nomads, who in migrating carry elsewhere, together with the sand, the beliefs, flavours and scents of Africa, blending them with local traditions.

via Regina Margherita, 80 – 91010 San Vito Lo Capo (TP)

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