Top 5 Caves トッレカンネからトッレサンレオナルド自然公園までの海岸砂丘での

Church of San Giacomo Among pastures and centuries-old olive groves, we reach the Torre Bianca farm and shortly thereafter the remains of the CHURCH of SAN GIACOMO, a place of worship on the cliff, cited by various sources from the sixteenth century. The proximity to the Via Traiana made it an obligatory stop for pilgrims who, on their return from the Holy Land, concluded their itinerary in San Giacomo di Compostela in Spain.

Near the Dolmen there is a small "lamia", a typical rural building surrounded by a spontaneous botanical garden, with figs and prickly pears, mulberries, vines, capers, carob trees. With a few steps, and a careful look, you will also be able to identify a "cave house" carved into the rock.

CHURCH of SAN GIACOMO, place of worship on the cliff, cited by various sources from the 16th century. The proximity to the Via Traiana made it an obligatory stop for pilgrims who, on their return from the Holy Land, concluded their itinerary in San Giacomo di Compostela in Spain.

Cave-villages, cave-churches, cave-shops, trapeti-caves belong to the civil, religious and artistic history of this region. The suggestive and unusual rocky paths reveal the treasures of underground Puglia hidden in the ravines of the ground. The rock settlements offer a real journey through time and space. An intertwining of paths and caves, a village built on various levels of the rocky ridges that host them, where it is still possible to reconstruct the life of the communities that lived there. The well, the oil mill, the cemetery and the church around which life pulsated highlight the links existing between the underground settlements and the territory, the caves not only as places of mystical asceticism but also centers of life and work.

Artificial underground cavity almost certainly used as an oil mill or used as a post station

Along the road we find on the right almost at the edge of the blade known as Torre Bianca a Trappeto known as the Arco placed between extensive arable land with sparse olive trees whose crown is shaped like a flag by the mistral wind creating a suggestive landscape similar to an African savannah . We have news of this mill in 1519 in a description of the properties of the bishop's canteen of Ostuni of which it was part. It was called the "trappeto dell’arco" in reference to the toponym of the district which was already called "degli Archi" in the thirteenth century, crossed by a road indicated with the same term. Qualified as "ancient" in the land registry of 1608, it is "ruined" in the following one of 1613.

From the dirt road of the caves of San Giacomo, go along the bridge entering on a dirt road, up to a sudden right turn into a downhill single track that leads straight to the cave.

It begins as a natural watercourse from the "Spennati" district; follows as a watercourse, in some points contained by human intervention through the districts "Casamassima" and "Spagnulo" to reach the Lamacornola farm where the real blade begins and ends along the coast of the Adriatic Sea Pilone (San Leonardo River). In this blade there are two underground trappets and some caves.