Many vacationers come to Sicily to combine relaxation and sporting activities. If you belong to the group of individual vacationers who feel more comfortable in a vacation apartment or a vacation home than in a hotel, it is advisable to adjust the location to your sporting interests.
If you like diving or mountain biking, the region around Cefalù – about 70 km west of the island’s capital Palermo – is a good choice. Just outside the castle hill of Rocca di Cefalù, you’ll find the remains of a port facility built by the Romans. Experienced divers will not find the house reef a great challenge, but it is well suited for returning divers. By boat you can reach exciting diving areas where you can find barracudas, moray eels, octopuses, tunas as well as seahorses. The diving depths are between 6 and 30 meters. Partly the underwater animals behave very shy, because at some places there are also locals with harpoons. The dive sites “Finale do Pollena” and “Finale Cape Valture” are each 20 meters deep. Slowly you can circle around the steep, 30 meters deep rock “Campanari”.
As far as Isole Egadi in the far west near Trapani, the dive sites stretch along the northwest coast of Sicily. However, the diving grounds around Favignana, the largest of the three Egadi islands, are considered quite shallow. Ustica, the volcanic island just 8 km² off the coast of Palermo, is different, offering a popular diving region. The entire belt of the Tyrrhenian Sea around the island is designated as a nature reserve. In this respect, you will find a largely intact underwater world here and also encounter rarer marine life. Thanks to its volcanic origin, there is also volcanic rock underwater, which is home to a diverse fauna.
Do you prefer to pedal hard? The mountains in Sicily are very demanding for racing cyclists and mountain bikers who want to improve their condition and train extensively here. Because the differences in altitude are considerable. More and more bikers come to compete against the mountains around Cefalù and pedal kilometer after kilometer on high-quality bikes. The appropriate sports equipment can be rented, for example, in one of the local hotels, where bike training camps are also organized. Among the attractive excursion destinations that can also be reached by bike from your vacation apartment is the Parco delle Madonie, a mountainous nature park south of Cefalù. In the middle of it lies the picturesque country estate Agriturismo Tenuta Luogo Marchese at an altitude of 240 meters.