Page 222 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

bikes and scooters (€5/15 per day).

Boat tours The boat trips (around €15 per person) offered at the Porto di Levante in
summer visit the caves and bays on the island’s west side.

The fanghi

Via Porto Levante snc • Easter–Oct daily 7am–9pm • €3

Located directly to the north of Porto di Levante, a brief walk between the
multicoloured rock pinnacles, are the famed fanghi or mud baths, more exactly one
pool containing a thick yellow soup of foul-smelling sulphurous mud, in which people
flop belly-up, caking every centimetre of their bodies with the stuff. The smell is

indescribable, and the degree of radioactivity makes it inadvisable to immerse
yourself for any length of time, and unsuitable for young children or pregnant women.
Avoid contact with the eyes (it stings mightily) and remove contact lenses as well as
any silver or leather jewellery, which will be ruined just by coming into contact with
the sand hereabouts. When you’ve had enough, hobble over to rinse yourself off in the
nearby sea, where natural hot water springs bubble up. Note that outside of the
summer season, you can just walk in and wallow for free.

The Gran Cratere

Daily daylight hours • €3 in summer • Follow the road immediately to the left of Porto di Levante dock for 500m or
so until you’re directed off the road to the left and up the slope to the crater

Vulcano’s main crater, the Gran Cratere, is just to the south of Porto di Levante. It
takes an hour to walk up to the crater, and it’s a toughish climb, on a slithery path
that’s totally exposed to the sun – do it early or late in the day in the summer months,

and wear strong shoes. The only vegetation consists of a few hardy gorse bushes on
the lower slopes, nibbled at by goats whose bells echo across the scree. The first part
of the path ascends a virtually black-sand dune before reaching the harder volcanic
crust, where it runs above the rivulets caused by previous eruptions. Reaching a ledge
with views over all the other Aeolian islands, you look down into the vast crater
itself, where vapour emissions – acrid and yellow – billow from the surrounding

surfaces. Follow the crater in an anticlockwise direction, so you are going downhill
rather than up through the clouds of sulphurous emissions on the northern rim, where
nerves are not exactly steadied by the admonitory notices at the start of the climb
reading “Do not sit down, do not lie down”.

Porto di Ponente

A narrow neck of land separates Porto di Levante from Porto di Ponente, a fifteen-
minute walk past the fanghi. Here, a perfect arc of fine black sand lines a bay looking
onto the towering pillars of rock that rise out of the channel between Vulcano and