B&B MiraValle Agrigento is just a 6-minute drive from the Garden of the Kolymbetra.
The Garden of the Kolymbethra (a Greek term indicating a type of pool used in Roman times for water games) is an archaeological site of great naturalistic and landscape importance, located in a small valley in the heart of the Valley of the Temples in AgrigentoIn 1999 it was entrusted to the Italian Environment Fund (FAI), under a free concession from the Sicilian Region, for a period of 25 years, becoming one of the archaeological and naturalistic sites of great importance at territorial and national level, thus ending the situation of abandonment that had arisen in the last decades of the twentieth century. The vegetational and structural restoration organised by the FAI also led to the discovery of some hypogea.
In the same period in which the Kolymbetra was built, the famous Akragas temples and the hypogea were also constructed with the help of many slaves captured in battle: artificial tunnels designed to collect the water seeping from a type of porous rock, calcarenite, and to channel it, through a system of conduits, from the hill towards the basin of the Kolymbetra, constantly feeding the pool. The garden, besides being a holiday resort for the Akragas tyrants, was also a meeting place for all the city's inhabitants: here the women gathered to wash clothes and anyone who wished could cool off in the clear waters of the pool.
A century after the Battle of Himera, Diodorus Siculus himself states that the basin was filled in and turned into a vegetable garden, thus becoming a rich cultivable area. The presence of the hypogea, whose original function was adapted to agricultural use, proved fundamental; the water channelled by these aqueducts fed a small tank, or 'gebbia', located next to the outlet of a hypogeum, which served to irrigate the garden. This system still works today, keeping the land cultivable.
Around 1100 AD, the Garden was transformed into a cane field, where sugar cane was grown.
Tommaso Fazello, historian and Dominican friar, recounts that, around the 16th century [2], the Garden of the Kolymbethra became an horti abatiae, that is, the vegetable garden of the nearby convent of the Badia Bassa.
Later, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when fruit-tree cultivation spread in Sicily, it became a citrus garden.
In 1999 the Sicilian Region entrusted the Garden to the FAI under a free concession for a period of 25 years, ending the situation of decay that had arisen from the last decades of the twentieth century.
In 2007 and 2009 the Garden of the Kolymbethra entered the ranking of 'The Most Beautiful Park in Italy', placing among the 10 finalists of the competition.
« … The ancient famous Akragas Kolymbetra was really much further down, at the lowest point of the plateau, where three small valleys meet and the rocks divide and the line of the harsh ridge, on which the Temples stand, is interrupted by a wide opening. In that place, now called Abbadia Bassa, the people of Akragas, a hundred years after the founding of their city ⏎ , had formed the fishpond, a great basin of water that extended as far as the Hypsas and whose dam, together with the river, contributed to the fortification of the city… »
(Luigi Pirandello, The Old and the Young)
The Garden of the Kolymbethra extends over a little more than five hectares, within which you can find a rich agricultural variety typical of the Valley of the Temples. On the valley floor are various species including citrus, carob, pistachio, mulberry, walnut, pomegranate and banana trees; along the river and at the foot of the limestone walls are almond and olive trees, traditional vegetable gardens and Mediterranean scrub with myrtle, laurel, mastic, terebinth, phillyrea, holm oak, spurge, buckthorn, broom, dwarf palm, ampelodesmos and carob.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
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