Aterno-Pescara

Pescara (Latin: Aternus) is a river in Italy. The length is 145 km. The river is navigable only at the mouth in the city of Pescara. The river first flows as the Aterno southeast through the province of L'Aquila, turns northeast above Popoli. Then the Gizio flows towards it, from here it is called Pescara. Here it breaks through the Abruzzo and forms the border between the provinces of Teramo and Chieti until it reaches the Adriatic Sea.

The "spring" with the name "Riserva Naturale delle Sorgenti del Pescara" is located on the road to Vitorito about 5 km from Popoli and is equipped as a recreational area with a large parking lot, children's playground and barbecue station. The actual spring area itself, which is somewhat distant, comprises a 49-hectare area from the karst spring, protected since 1986, with a lake in its dense reed belt, where the coot, heron and the rare kingfisher, among others, find shelter. It is also the last refuge of the brook lamprey in Italy, although the number of animals is dwindling year by year.

The reed bed used to be commercially exploited. Nowadays, since it is no longer allowed to be harvested, the lake is getting smaller and the various reed belts are getting bigger. The area is part of the largest bird sanctuary in Abruzzo and is the target of various ornithological studies. In this large area, in many places the water comes directly from the mountain slope or from the sandy subsoil in the lake.

Much of this spring water comes from the karstic plateaus of Campo Imperatore, the strikingly shaped mountain range in the Gran Sasso area, at altitudes ranging from 1600 to 2200 meters. From the precipitation in the mountains to the source, the surface water and the water just below the surface takes about a month. The deep water, due to the accident during the tunnel boring in the Grand Sasso, one of the underground lakes was bored, is stored in different lakes for more than 20 years until it emerges from the rock with more than 7000 liters per second.

In the summer of 2007, the driest for a long time, the spring areas around Popoli carried little water, more precisely the Callisto spring with about 1000 liters of water per second, so that there were impairments in the water supply of the cities of Pescara and Chieti. It is not yet known to what extent the various forest fires, in which a fire-fighting helicopter also had an accident, will affect the vegetation and thus also the spring water.

Various studies are in preparation, since the fires, some of them devastating, have devastated large parts of the natural park. In some cases they could be kept away from the localities only very narrowly, however, some farms and observation huts have been destroyed.

The lake can only be entered at a cleared spot and the area only on fenced hiking trails. If hikers are found outside these trails, they face severe penalties.