In short. Peschici is a Byzantine village of white houses standing above a bay on the north coast of the Gargano, founded in the ninth century and fought over ever since. It has six good beaches within a few kilometres, a working trabucco you can eat on, and a lot less noise than its neighbour down the coast.
Vieste is the town most people book. Peschici is the one they photograph on the way past and wish they had booked instead — smaller, higher, whiter, and with a bay right underneath it.
A village the Byzantines built
Peschici was founded by the Byzantines in the ninth century, and after them came the Normans, the Swabians and the Aragonese in turn. That sequence is written into the village: white houses, narrow cobbled lanes and an architecture that is not quite like anywhere else on the promontory.
Just outside the village stands the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria di Calena, one of the older religious foundations on the Gargano and an easy detour.
The beaches, one by one
The coast around Peschici is a chain of bays, and they are genuinely different from one another — which is unusual, and useful.
- Baia di Manaccora — the most striking of them, ringed by cliffs and natural caves.
- Baia di San Nicola — quiet and picturesque, clear water, the one to go to for a calm day.
- Baia di Calalunga — fine golden sand, shallow, the family choice.
- Spiaggia di Zaiana — young, lively, beach parties. Go or avoid accordingly.
- Baia del Turco — more secluded, and less crowded than any of the above.
- Spiaggia di Procinisco — white sand and turquoise water, and not much else.
The sea here is clear, with sandy bottoms that make it good for swimming and for snorkelling. Most bays have a mix of equipped lidos and free beach.
The trabucco
What a trabucco is. A timber platform on stilts driven into the rock, with long arms that swing nets out over the water — a fishing machine built to work a coast where there is nowhere to launch a boat. They are centuries old and specific to this stretch of the Adriatic. Several around Peschici survive, and at least one has become a restaurant where you eat over the sea on the structure itself. It is the single most Gargano thing you can do with an evening.
Eating
Fish, obviously, and the boats land it here. But the other half of the menu is inland Apulian: orecchiette with turnip tops above all, which on the Gargano is as much a fixture as anything from the sea. The old town fills up in the evening with events, small markets and, in season, village feasts.
Around it
Down the coast is Vieste, twenty minutes away and the busier of the two. Boats leave from here for the Tremiti islands. Inland, the forest starts almost immediately and the road climbs towards Monte Sant’Angelo.
Peschici is on the northern coast of the Gargano — the quieter half of it.
