Bandiera Blu
Bandiera Blu in Apulia
18 towns
Apulia holds 18 Bandiera Blu sites inside our catalogue. They cluster in the Lecce, Foggia, and Brindisi provinces.
The three most recognised in our catalogue are Castellaneta, Lecce, and Maruggio. 15 more towns carry the mark alongside them.
Castellaneta
Province: Taranto · 235 m
A cliff-edge Murge town at 235 meters above the Gravina Grande canyon, birthplace of Rudolph Valentino in 1895, with a Bandiera Blu Ionian marina.
Lecce
Province: Lecce · 49 m
The Baroque capital of the Salento, ninety-four thousand people on the Lecce-stone plain, carving its façades in honey limestone since 1500.
Maruggio
Province: Taranto · 35 m
Salento's Knights of Malta borgo — a fortified Borgo più Bello on a low Ionian hill with 11 km of Bandiera Blu coast at Campomarino, Negroamaro and Primitivo vines pressing into the centro, and a unique commanderie history that made it the Order's southern Italian headquarters for 600 years.
Vieste
Province: Foggia · 43 m
The Gargano headland of whitewashed alleys on a white limestone cliff, with the Pizzomunno sea stack standing 26 meters offshore.
Carovigno
Province: Brindisi · 161 m
An upper Salento town between Brindisi and Ostuni, built on the Messapian Carbina destroyed in 473 BC, with the Torre Guaceto marine reserve offshore.
Fasano
Province: Brindisi · 118 m
A Brindisi-province town from the Adriatic up to the Itria escarpment, holding the Roman ruins of Egnazia, the Selva, and Europe's second-largest safari park.
Melendugno
Province: Lecce · 36 m
Salento's archaeological-beach capital — a 10,000-resident Lecce-province comune covering 17 km of Adriatic coast with three Bandiera Blu beaches (Torre dell'Orso, San Foca, Sant'Andrea), the Grotta della Poesia karst pool (one of the world's most beautiful natural pools per National Geographic), and the Bronze-Age-to-Messapian-to-medieval Roca Vecchia archaeological site.
Peschici
Province: Foggia · 91 m
A Gargano cliff-top village above the Adriatic with a Norman castle of 1023, white houses spilling toward the sea and trabucchi on the headlands.
Bisceglie
Province: Barletta-Andria-Trani · 16 m
An Adriatic port town between Trani and Molfetta, named for Roman watchtowers, with five dolmens around it and a Norman cathedral begun in 1073.
Gallipoli
Province: Lecce · 12 m
The Ionian beach city on a limestone island, Greek Kallipolis meaning beautiful city, tied to the mainland by a seventeenth-century bridge.
Manduria
Province: Taranto · 79 m
The Messapian capital thirty-five kilometers east of Taranto, ringed by three concentric stone walls and the home of Primitivo.
Monopoli
Province: Bari · 9 m
An Adriatic walled town forty kilometers south of Bari, the Charles V castle on the headland, 156 square kilometers of coastline behind it.
Nardò
Province: Lecce · 45 m
The second city of Salento after Lecce, a Baroque inland capital twenty-five kilometers from Lecce with a Ionian coastline behind it.
Ostuni
Province: Brindisi · 218 m
The Città Bianca on three hills at 218 meters, eight kilometers inland, whitewashed against the Murge above an Adriatic plain of olive trees.
Ugento
Province: Lecce · 108 m
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Isole Tremiti
Province: Foggia · 116 m
An Adriatic archipelago of five islands twenty-two kilometers off the Gargano, the only Italian commune scattered across an open-sea group.
Rodi Garganico
Province: Foggia · 42 m
A Gargano promontory town above the Adriatic, citrus capital of the peninsula, with DOP oranges and lemons grown since the Middle Ages.
Polignano a Mare
Province: Bari · 24 m
The Adriatic cliff town thirty kilometers south of Bari, built on a twenty-metre limestone bluff, birthplace of Domenico Modugno.
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From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Putignano
Province: Bari
Europe's longest-running carnival — Putignano Carnevale has run continuously since 1394, with 631 years of cartapesta papier-mâché floats, a 26,000-resident Murgia town on the Bari–Lecce plateau, and the Grotta del Trullo karst cave inside the centro.
Pistoia
Province: Pistoia
Italy's nursery capital and the medieval Tuscan rival that gave its name to the pistol — a quietly extraordinary centro storico of zebra-striped Romanesque churches, Andrea della Robbia's polychrome frieze on the Ospedale del Ceppo, and Italy's Capital of Culture 2017, all 30 minutes from Florence by train.
Tropea
Province: Vibo Valentia
Cliff town on a tufa headland over the Tyrrhenian Coast of the Gods, with a Norman monastery on a sea rock.
Caldes
Province: Trento
A scattered Val di Sole commune on the Noce, six hamlets gathered around a thirteenth-century tower-house castle that once belonged to the Thun family.
Cantiano
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
A border borgo at 374 meters under Monte Catria on the old Via Flaminia, known for the Good Friday Turba and the sour-cherry visciola harvest.