Gran Paradiso: Italy's First National Park and the Last Wild Alpine Ibex

The Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) is one of the most extraordinary animals alive. It can climb slopes so steep that a human would fall, using its split hooves like two independently pivoting climbers' holds. Its horns can grow over a metre long, sweeping back in elegant curves. Its fur in winter turns pale gold. And in 1821, the entire world population of wild Alpine ibex had been reduced to fewer than 60 individuals, all living in the mountains around what is now the Gran Paradiso National Park in the Graian Alps. They were saved by an unlikely protector: Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia and later first King of unified Italy, who made the valley a royal hunting reserve. Only the king could hunt the ibex — and he hunted sparingly enough that the population survived.

In 1922, Victor Emmanuel III donated the former royal hunting grounds to the Italian state, and the Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso became Italy's first national park — 71,000 hectares of high Alpine terrain spanning the Aosta Valley and Piedmont. The decision came just in time: the park's ibex population had been further reduced by poaching during World War I. Under park protection, the ibex recovered. Today around 4,000 ibex live in the park, along with large populations of chamois (camoscio), golden eagles, marmots, and, increasingly, wolves and lynx that have recolonised the area from neighbouring France and Switzerland.

What makes Gran Paradiso extraordinary for visitors is accessibility. Because the ibex have no natural fear of humans (they were protected for generations before they could develop it), they will sometimes walk to within a few metres of a hiker. In the Val di Rhêmes or the Val Savaranche, on any morning from June to September, you can almost guarantee seeing ibex on the high slopes above the tree line. The park also offers some of the finest high-altitude hiking in the Alps: the classic circuit of the Gran Paradiso massif is a 4-day trek passing through four valleys at heights of 2,000–3,000 metres, with views of the massif's 4,061-metre summit.

The Gran Paradiso massif itself — at 4,061 metres, the only entirely Italian four-thousander in the Alps (all other Italian 4,000m peaks are shared with France or Switzerland) — is also a popular mountaineering objective. The standard route up the Gran Paradiso via the Vittorio Sella refuge is a Grade PD (peu difficile) Alpine route: a glacier approach followed by a ridge walk to the summit. In summer, hundreds of mountaineers attempt it each week. The views from the summit extend across the entire western Alps from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn — a panorama that makes the effort entirely worthwhile.