Beaches up the Coast

With our Salento Bus success, the next day we decided to take a different route and hopped on the 101 from Lecce to famous Torre dell'Orso beach. The perfect storm of August, the month that most Italians take off and make their pilgrimage to the country's beaches, and Saturday, the weekend's prime, made the beach unbearably busy. We stared down from the cliff below before diving into the crowds. Five minutes later, we gave up and meandered back towards the direction that the bus dropped us off at. From afar, it WAS beautiful.

As we wandered along the coast, we could see people swimming in the clear blue sea. A few conversations with strangers in broken Italian later, we found a little stairway carved into the rocks that led down to a local watering hole in the town of Melendugno. The added benefit--it was significantly quieter than its neighbour up the coast.

The water was blue, blue again. And freezing cold, the kind of cold that momentarily takes your breath away. So we dropped towels on the rocks, made friends with the other locals there and lizarded out for a couple of hours.

We eventually continued on to lunch before walking up the coastal road, past some stunning stone wall, through to the town of Roca and over to the Grotta della Poesia, another local attraction that invites day trippers by the many.

People get their kicks here by jumping off the cliffs, either into the 15 feet/4 meter deep sinkhole below or into the sea itself. Legend has it that this was the favourite swimming spot of an ancient princess and poets were inspired to write about this.

Further up the coast and heading up towards San Foca, the area's biggest town, continued to yield stunning views. Years of erosion carved caves into the cliffs and people delighted in finding their own private swimming spots.

Even further up the coast, the beauty continued. We eventually found a beach connected to a bar and cafe. There was actual beach here, not just rocks, but it wasn't the most beautiful beach, or scenery, there. If you're heading this way, you won't find golden sand beaches. But that doesn't make it any less beautiful or worth visiting.

We eventually caught back up with the bus outside of the shops between Roca and San Foca. Thankfully, the masses got on the bus a bit later on and we got to ride back to Lecce into the setting sun, which seemed entirely appropriate for the, yet again, beautiful day.