Walking Holidays in Sicily: A Local’s Guide to the Best Trails

Are you thinking about a walking holiday in Sicily? Maybe you’ve walked before in other parts of Italy and fancy something different this time, somewhere that isn’t Tuscany or Piemonte again. Sicily is a genuinely rewarding place to walk, and after twenty-five years exploring the island on foot, I want to give you an honest picture of what to expect: where to go, when to go, what makes it different from walking anywhere else in Italy, and why, once you’ve caught the bug, it’s very hard to shake off.

The Big Decisions

Before you book anything, there are a few decisions to make. First, what time of year. Second, how you want to walk: on your own with a hire car, following a long-distance footpath, or joining a small group. If you go independently, you’ll also need to think about logistics, particularly if you want to walk point to point rather than in circular routes, since you’ll need to get back to wherever your car is parked. We’ll work through all of this below.

Where to Walk: Sicily’s Best Hiking Regions

The first surprise for most people is how big Sicily actually is. Walking from one side of the island to the other is a serious undertaking. If you’ve only got a week, you’ll want to pick one area and get to know it properly rather than trying to cover too much ground.

Mount Etna is the obvious starting point, and it has a genuinely large variety of walks. Just bear in mind that reaching the summit itself is a serious undertaking, only possible with a licensed guide, and sometimes not possible at all when the volcano is active.

The Madonie Mountains are, for me, the single most beautiful part of Sicily, and the Madonie National Park has some superb walking. One thing worth knowing: the heart of the Madonie is the area around Pomieri, which used to have a large hotel that closed during the pandemic and has never reopened. With so little accommodation left there (just a little at Piano Battaglia), many self-guided walking holidays now route around this area rather than through it. I think that’s a real shame, because to my mind it’s the most beautiful stretch of the whole range.

The Nebrodi are quieter and more wooded, one of the shadier corners of Sicily and a real relief if you’ve had enough sun elsewhere. The trade-off is that accommodation is thinner on the ground here, so it takes a bit more planning.

The Sicani Mountains, south of Palermo, are gentler than the Madonie (nowhere near the scale of the Dolomites), characterised by farmland and pastureland rather than dramatic peaks, but pleasant walking all the same. Don’t overlook the hills right behind Palermo either: Monte Iato, the walks around Piana degli Albanesi, and Ficuzza Wood with the tough but rewarding climb up Rocca Busambra.

The Iblean Mountains, in the southeast around Ragusa, Modica, Noto and Palazzolo, offer a completely different kind of walking, defined by deep limestone gorges. Long-distance routes are tricky here since you’re constantly climbing in and out of gorges, but the rewards are real. Pantalica in particular, despite being close to Siracusa, feels remarkably remote and takes patience to reach, but it’s worth the extra time.

The Peloritani Mountains, between Etna and Messina, are my own personal favourite of everywhere I’ve walked on the island. Very few maps exist and I’ve never seen these walks written up in any guidebook, which only adds to the appeal. The tracks are rough, but the views from the top over the Strait of Messina, across to the Aeolian Islands and Calabria, and back to Etna, are some of the best in Sicily.

The Aeolian Islands deserve a special mention of their own: superb walking, but tougher than the modest length and height of the trails would suggest (more on why below). Alicudi’s summit is a personal favourite, and the walk on Panarea to Pizzo del Corvo is superb.

One area I’d steer you away from is the flat western coastal strip around Marsala, Selinunte, Trapani and Erice. It’s an interesting part of Sicily for plenty of other reasons, just not the best for walking.

The Long-Distance Footpaths

If you’ve been inspired by a newspaper article to try one of Sicily’s long-distance trails, here are the main options:

• The Via San Giacomo, between Palermo and Agrigento, takes around ten days through mainly farmland, staying in B&Bs along the way. Book accommodation well ahead, since it’s limited.
• The Via Santa Rosalia, between Santo Stefano di Quisquina and Palermo, is shorter but covers similar territory to the Via San Giacomo.
• The Via dei Frati (“the brothers’ way,” named for the monks), between Caltanissetta and Cefalù.

When to Go

Avoid June, July and August. There’s very little shade anywhere in Sicily (the Nebrodi is the exception), and it gets scorching hot fast. Early in the year, January through April, brings its own problems: proper torrential rain rather than drizzle, and farmland that turns seriously muddy underfoot.

That leaves May as the standout month, with spring flowers and (mostly) comfortable temperatures, alongside September, October and even into November for good walking weather.

One genuine surprise for a lot of people: winter in the mountains is properly cold. If you’re up in the Madonie in January or February, expect snow, and pack accordingly (see below).

Why Walking Never Really Caught On in Sicily

Sicilians themselves haven’t traditionally been great hikers, certainly not in the way northern Italians head into the Alps and the Dolomites, and there’s a good historical reason for that.

Sicily was once densely forested, and in Greek times the only practical way around the island was by ship, which is why most Greek cities sit on the coast. It was the Romans who cleared much of that forest for their latifundia, the large agricultural estates that spread across the island. Add centuries of pirate raids and invasions, and you get the pattern of Sicilian towns built defensively on hilltops rather than down among the fields. The consequence: peasants would walk out to their fields each morning, work all day, and walk home again. Walking was never a pastime, it was a necessity, which is part of why many older Sicilians will still take the car rather than walk to the end of the village if they can help it.

The old routes that did exist were the trazzere, drovers’ roads used for transumanza, the seasonal movement of livestock to market or up into the mountains (the word comes from the Latin trans, across, and humus, soil).

For a long time, the interior of Sicily had almost no proper roads at all. Getting around meant horseback, donkey, or walking, and the resulting isolation meant the countryside was frequented by brigands, a genuinely dangerous place to be. There was never a Sicilian Wordsworth wandering the hills for pleasure the way there was in the Lake District. It’s only relatively recently that walking in Sicily for its own sake has become something people do at all, which is exactly what makes it feel so fresh today.

How to Organise Your Walking Holiday

Broadly, you have four options. You can hire a car and base yourself somewhere, doing day walks and returning to your starting point each evening (fine for circular routes, more of a puzzle for point-to-point ones). You can tackle one of the long-distance footpaths above under your own steam. A growing number of companies will now support independent walkers on point-to-point routes, carrying your luggage between stops and organising accommodation along the way, a style of holiday that’s already popular across the rest of Italy and is quickly catching on in Sicily too. Or you can join a small group.

Given how patchy the signage and mapping can be (more below), a small group is, to my mind, still the easiest way to do it properly, and it comes with the safety net of other people around if anything goes wrong. But honestly, the real case for it isn’t safety or value: it’s simply much more enjoyable to spend the week walking with a small group of friendly, like-minded people than to do it alone.

What to Expect

Wildlife

No bears, no wolves. You’ll come across foxes, badgers and deer, and there are a few snakes worth being aware of (adders and vipers), plus scorpions in the summer months, though you’re unlikely to be walking in that heat anyway. Bites are genuinely rare. If anything is going to catch you off guard, it’s more likely to be cattle, or a farm dog defending its patch, than anything more exotic.

Maps and Waymarking

Good hiking maps are hard to come by in Sicily, and where routes are marked, they don’t always match the signage on the ground (where there’s any signage at all). Footpaths aren’t waymarked the way they are in northern Italy, and signs are often missing, wrong, or pointing the wrong way entirely. It makes the walking a little more demanding, but it’s also part of what makes it so enjoyable: you genuinely feel like you’re finding your own way, rather than following the same route as everyone else.

How Difficult Is It?

People consistently find walking in Sicily tougher than they expect, for a few reasons. It’s often hotter and more humid than walkers are used to, and there’s less shade than you’d like, which can be draining. Set out as early in the day as you possibly can; it’s the single best tip for walking anywhere in Sicily.

The going underfoot can also be harder than expected. Many paths cross open farmland rather than following proper footpaths, which means mud in the wetter months, and bare rock underfoot in places like the Madonie. Water sources are less frequent than in many other walking destinations, so you’ll often be carrying more of it, and more weight, than you’re used to. All of this adds up, and it shouldn’t be underestimated, especially in places like the Aeolian Islands, where the trails are short and the peaks aren’t especially high, but the walking itself is genuinely tough.

What to Pack

Nothing too unusual, with one exception: if you’re walking in the Madonie in winter, take microspikes and walking poles. Compacted snow melts in the daytime sun and refreezes overnight into ice, which is genuinely dangerous underfoot. Beyond that, the usual essentials apply: a hat, gloves for the colder months, and plenty of water.

The Real Highlights

After twenty-five years walking this island, a few places stand out above everything else. Palazzo Adriano is beautiful. The Madonie remains closest to my heart, especially the area beneath Pomieri on the walk up to Piano Pomo above Castelbuono, somewhere I spent a lot of time years ago, wild boar and all. The Nebrodi rightly has its own devoted following. On the Aeolian Islands, the hike to the summit of Alicudi and the walk on Panarea to Pizzo del Corvo are both superb.

But if I’m honest, my absolute favourite walking in Sicily is in the Peloritani, on the hike above Santa Lucia towards Posto Leone, and around Piano Margi. It’s some of the most beautiful landscape on the island, and remains almost entirely undiscovered.

And don’t miss the Nebrodi’s waterfalls: the walk from Longi to Alcara li Fusi, taking in Portella Gazzana and the Cascata del Catafurco, is some of the most beautiful, and least visited, walking anywhere on the island. Personally, I’d take it over the Via San Giacomo any day.

Why Walk With Esplora

I’ve been walking across Sicily for twenty-five years now, and I know this island like the back of my hand. We run small-group walking holidays here, built around exactly the kind of routes and hidden corners described above. If any of this has caught your imagination, take a look at our Sicily walking tours and come and join us.