With its monumental history and culture, dramatic changing landscapes, fine cuisine and near perfect year round climate Sicily might just steal your heart.

West & South West Coast of Sicily

The southern coast of Sicily is a strange mix: it's where you'll find the island at its most underdeveloped and rural and it is a quiet, sparsely populated region with a welcoming mixture of rich farmland, quietly alluring towns and long empty beaches, perfect for swimming; yet having said all that the developments that are here, are brutal and ugly, at odds with what surrounds them.

Thankfully the former features vastly overshadow the latter and make this coast one of Sicily's hidden gems.

Things To See & Do in West & South West Coast of Sicily

Visit the UNESCO World Heritage site of The Valley of the Temples
Swim in the blue seas from one of the many gorgeous beaches such as Eraclea Minoa
Take a boat out to the marine paradise of the Pelagic Islands
Visit the Museo Regionale Archeologico at Gela

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West & South West Coast of Sicily Region Map

Selinunte and Agrigento

Selinunte is a beguiling place - set on a promontory between two rivers, it is an abandoned, once highly prosperous, Greek city. The city was sacked by the Carthaginians in the 5th century BC and was consequently used as an outpost. Destroyed by the 1693 earthquake the city itself has crumbled away and lays buried underneath the shifting landscape, but the temples built by the original city's founders, and including the city Acropolis and a temple called The Sanctuary of Malophorous, still remain and are some of the most impressive ruins in the world.

South of Selinunte you leave Trapani region, and enter that of Agrigento, site of the largest collection of Greek temples on the island, and indeed outside Greece. Try the minor road from outside Selinunte to Sciacca (if you have time - most minor Sicilian roads can only be taken at a leisurely pace). Admire the port at Sciacca - one of Italy's oldest spa towns - and when you continue, yield to temptation, take a side turning and discover one of the many very attractive sandy beaches, which line this part of the coast, for example Eraclea Minoa.

Situated, as it is, near the fabled Valley of the Temples, Agrigento itself can be something of a shock. Despite the importance and beauty of the temples, and the joke in finding that the playwright Pirandello came from a village called Kaos, building of various kinds overwhelms the area. The original city of Agrigento has of course grown, and had been joined by substantial modern hotel developments, a series of motorways, which on the whole complicate getting around, and industrial development by the sea at Porto Empedocle.