Lecce Geography

Lecce sits near the middle of the Salento, the narrow peninsula at the very bottom of the Italian mainland, and almost every feature of the place follows from the rock underneath it.

Between two seas

The city stands at about fifty metres above sea level on an almost completely flat plain. The Adriatic is roughly ten kilometres east, at San Cataldo; the Ionian is about twenty-five kilometres south-west, towards Gallipoli. Nowhere in the Salento is far from water, and the two coasts are markedly different — low and rocky on the Adriatic side, longer and sandier towards the Ionian.

The stone

The whole peninsula is a slab of pietra leccese, a fine-grained yellow limestone that is unusually soft when first quarried and hardens after exposure to the air. It is the reason the city looks the way it does, and it is quarried within sight of the town.

No rivers

There are effectively no surface watercourses in the Salento. Rain drains straight down through the porous limestone into an underground system of channels and caves, which is why the landscape is dry, why sinkholes open in the fields, and why water has always had to be dug for rather than diverted.

Wetland on the coast

Where the plain meets the Adriatic south of San Cataldo, a strip of dune, marsh and brackish pond survives as the Le Cesine reserve, a remnant of the wetlands that covered this coast before they were drained, and a stop for migrating birds.

The olive plain

Outside the walls the land is a near-continuous grove of olives, some of the trees a thousand years old. Since 2013 the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa has killed enormous numbers of them, and large stretches of the Salento are now grey standing deadwood. It is the most visible thing about the landscape today and locals will tell you so.