Agropoli

Referred as the "Gate of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park", Agropoli is a mixture of sea, sun, traditions, culture, history, gastronomy, tranquility and nature. The sea of Agropoli has a special charm with its iridescent colors that made it renowned all over Italy.
The promontory on which Agropoli rises hosted small communities since the Neolithic, but only in the successive ages of Bronze and Iron it became inhabited in a stable and continuous way by indigenous populations based on hunting and fishing. The Greeks, before and after the foundation of the nearby town of Poseidonia (around 625 BC), used this area for their traffic with the local populations, calling the promontory with the Greek word Petra and building on it a temple dedicated to Artemis, goddess of hunting. In the Roman era, a seaside village called Ercula developed on the coast of S. Marco, which flourished, as has been ascertained, between the I century BC. B.C. and the V century a.C., when the port of Poseidonia (then called by the Romans Paestum) underwent a process of progressive silting up following coastal bradyseism. When, during the fifth century, the incursions of the Vandals from Africa made it difficult for Ercula to exist, its inhabitants retreated to the facing promontory which offered greater possibilities of defense. Agropoli was particularly struck by the barbarian incursions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which it was depopulated to the point of counting only a few hundred inhabitants. Nowadays the town of Agropoli, which only during the nineteenth century began to expand beyond the perimeter of the medieval walls, preserves intact the ancient center and much of the circuit of the defensive walls with the seventeenth-century entrance portal.

Referred as the "Gate of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park", Agropoli is a mixture of sea, sun, traditions, culture, history, gastronomy, tranquility and nature. The sea of Agropoli has a special charm with its iridescent colors that made it renowned all over Italy.
The promontory on which Agropoli rises hosted small communities since the Neolithic, but only in the successive ages of Bronze and Iron it became inhabited in a stable and continuous way by indigenous populations based on hunting and fishing. The Greeks, before and after the foundation of the nearby town of Poseidonia (around 625 BC), used this area for their traffic with the local populations, calling the promontory with the Greek word Petra and building on it a temple dedicated to Artemis, goddess of hunting. In the Roman era, a seaside village called Ercula developed on the coast of S. Marco, which flourished, as has been ascertained, between the I century BC. B.C. and the V century a.C., when the port of Poseidonia (then called by the Romans Paestum) underwent a process of progressive silting up following coastal bradyseism. When, during the fifth century, the incursions of the Vandals from Africa made it difficult for Ercula to exist, its inhabitants retreated to the facing promontory which offered greater possibilities of defense. Agropoli was particularly struck by the barbarian incursions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which it was depopulated to the point of counting only a few hundred inhabitants. Nowadays the town of Agropoli, which only during the nineteenth century began to expand beyond the perimeter of the medieval walls, preserves intact the ancient center and much of the circuit of the defensive walls with the seventeenth-century entrance portal.