Botrugno · San Cassiano · Nociglia · Surano · Spongano · Sogliano Cavour · LE
It is a slow journey through six villages of inland Salento, all in the province of Lecce. The thread that the sources support is a specific countryside: the Parco agricolo multifunzionale dei Paduli, a plain of olive groves, canals and vore that took the place of an oak wood, and that includes four of the six municipalities, Botrugno, San Cassiano, Nociglia and Surano. Around it, small historic centres of medieval or older origin. It must be said honestly that the theme holds only in part: Spongano and Sogliano Cavour are not in the Park, the sources on them are few and there the account becomes shorter. It is an itinerary for those who read the agrarian landscape and the shape of villages.
At a glance
Duration. 3 days.
The route
Day 1 — Botrugno and San Cassiano, inside the Paduli
You set out from a countryside that has not always been like this. Until the end of the 19th century, writes the territorial plan drawn up by the ten Municipalities of the Paduli, this area was covered by a dense oak forest, the ancient wood of Belvedere; it was cleared and replaced mainly by olive groves, and few specimens of it remain. That it has remained little built-up has a cause in the water: floods and waterlogging, documented by travellers from the 17th century, a network of canals that carries the waters to the vore, the karst cavities, and a large aquifer underfoot. The masserie stand at the edges, along the Via Vecchia Lecce. The Park is not a protected area: it arises from a protocol signed on 12 December 2008 between the Regione Puglia and the Municipality of San Cassiano, and the document presents it as an alternative to the restrictive idea of a protected area. Botrugno lies on almost flat ground marked by karst, and according to the Ministry's record it was enfeoffed in 1193 by King Tancredi to Lancellotto Capece; afterwards, for the Sapere encyclopaedia, came the Maramonte and the Castriota-Scanderbeg. The detail is in the church of the Madonna di Costantinopoli, or of Sant'Antonio, beside the marquis's palace: for the same encyclopaedia it holds a 15th-century Madonna and Child in Byzantine style and the tomb of Raffaele Maramonte, dated 1564. The chapel of the Assunta, which the Municipalities' plan calls an ancient chapel of the Greek rite, was rebuilt in the 18th century but preserves the frescoed apse of the 14th-century building. San Cassiano stretches along the road between Maglie and Leuca, at the junction with the one for Poggiardo; its church-crypt of Santa Maria della Consolazione probably dates from the 11th-12th century, and has been consolidated and restored with public funds. The Municipalities' plan of 2009-2010 calculated that 60% of the municipal territory fell within the Park then being established, and the Park's website indicates a public olive grove here, the Bosco del Parco; some centuries-old oaks are the trace of the lost wood. In the 18th century the village also belonged to the Castriota of Botrugno, and only in 1975, the ministerial record recalls, did it cease to be a hamlet of Nociglia: it is from there that the next day starts again.
Day 2 — Nociglia and Surano
For the Ministry's record the settlement of Nociglia lies on a hilly rise, at 99 metres, grown on the slopes of the serra, and to the west the olive groves extend as far as the serra itself. The first records date back to 1378, when it was among the possessions of the Principality of Taranto; it was a hamlet of little importance, with mainly agricultural resources, passed among many feudal lords until the Gallone, who held it from 1663 and for whom the castle was built. Of the older one there remains a large square tower of the 16th century, with loopholes and machicolations. The Municipalities' plan describes the core of the “Casale” with its courtyards arranged in a ring around the Palazzo Baronale, and not far away the church of San Nicola; the italia.it portal points out a Marian chapel that houses a Byzantine church of the same saint. Surano, by contrast, is on the plain, between the Serra di Supersano and the Adriatic coast. The ministerial record explains its regular shape: a core around the castle and the square of the Parrocchiale, without real fortification, with blind alleys off three orthogonal streets. In 1190 the fief went to Gabriele Guarino, and the Guarini held it until 1806. The Municipality's history page, which states that it draws on Wikipedia and must therefore be re-checked, adds the figures of a crisis: 17 hearths in 1447, 5 in 1483, a decline it attributes to the Turkish invasion of Otranto in 1480. The same page reports that there were five hypogeal oil mills until the 1930s, and that at least two remain almost intact; and that in contrada Pozze, along the road that connected Surano and Spongano, there was a trilithic structure similar to a dolmen, destroyed in the 1970s by private land reclamation because it had not been recognised as such.
Day 3 — Spongano and Sogliano Cavour
Spongano lies outside the Paduli and receives a few lines, because the only source that could be opened is the Ministry's record. The hamlet is attested from the early 12th century, was part of the County of Castro and then of the Principality of Taranto, and in the 15th century was sparsely populated. The old core stretches along the road to Maglie and is closed to the south by the palazzo Bacile; the town gate probably stood at the start of via Carmine, where the road from Ortelle towards Leuca crosses the one for Maglie, and nearby was the Sedile. In 1780 there were attested, besides the Parrocchiale, the churches of San Teodoro, of the Pietà, of Sant'Angiolo and of the Carmine, some now vanished.
Sogliano Cavour, which the ministerial record places about 25 km south of Lecce, outside the Paduli, carries another story: for the same record it belongs to the Grecìa Salentina and kept the Byzantine rite until 1624; in the 17th century it was the Augustinians who favoured the passage to the Latin rite; beneath the church later entrusted to them a hypogeum remains. The plan is ovoid, with the streets converging on the castle, later the Palazzo Baronale; the late 15th-century circuit can still be read in the line of Corso Umberto I and of largo Porta, and two gates looked towards Soleto and Galatina. Recent analyses, the same record writes, suggest that the mother church of San Lorenzo Martire stands on Basilian caves with a necropolis area; the first church, of the 15th century, with a single nave, was enlarged in the mid-19th century because of the growth in population. The journey, in our proposal, ends here.
DRAFT of 2026-11-08 · local only · gate run: PASSES WITH CORRECTIONS, 13 defects corrected · not approved