Baia dei Saraceni, Varigotti
Baia dei Saraceni, Varigotti site features
Last updated on October 19, 2026The beach
It is small, enclosed and reached on foot. The bay sits behind the promontory, cut off from the borgo by it. Nothing published describes a road to it, a lido on it, or facilities of any kind.
The church above it is the landmark. The old chiesa di San Lorenzo rises halfway up the slope on the promontory, dominating the Baia dei Saraceni. It was built over the harbour when the harbour was still working.
The headland that shelters it is a ruin field. Punta Crena carries the watchtower of 1559 with convent remains beside it, a centuries-old olive grove on its seaward flank, the ruins of the Byzantine castrum, and on its eastern side a perimeter wall of the Byzantine civil settlement that stood by the port.
East of it the coast turns vertical. Between here and Capo Noli run vertical walls of crumbling rock hundreds of metres high — unstable enough that the coastal railway outside the tunnels needed continuous maintenance and was eventually abandoned.
What is not here is any trace of the port. The basin filled, and nothing published describes a mole, a quay or a wreck. The harbour survives as a shape in the land and as the name of a bay.
Key highlights
A Byzantine harbour under a beach
The port that gave Byzantine shipping its safe landing on this coast, keeping the link with the fortifications of the Ligurian Apennines and the Maritime Alps. It is the reason there is a castrum on the hill above.
The promontory that encloses it
Punta Crena, which acts as the barrier between the borgo and the inlet. Everything that defended the harbour is on it, and so is the church that was built above the harbour.
The old church looking down
The chiesa di San Lorenzo, mid-slope, dominating the bay. Varigotti's first parish church, all that survives of a Benedictine monastery, and restored from 1995 with materials lifted by helicopter.
A name with no proof behind it
The Saracens of the bay's name. The inhabitants were traditionally called saraceni and a hamlet is called Ca' de Mori, but the hypothesis of an actual Saracen base here is recorded as devoid of real confirmation.
The end of free camping
Until the mid-1960s it was still possible to camp freely on this beach. That it was once possible, and is no longer, is the clearest published measure of how the pressure on this bay has changed.