Agrigento Geography

Agrigento occupies the southern flank of Sicily, facing Africa across open sea, and its shape is the whole explanation of the ancient city's plan.

Two ridges and two rivers

The modern town stands at about 230 metres on a hill between two watercourses, the Akragas and the Hypsas, which meet below it and run to the sea. Between that hill and the coast lies a second, lower ridge running east to west. The Greeks put their sanctuaries along the crest of the lower ridge, where they would be seen from the water, and lived on the slopes behind. This is why the so-called Valley of the Temples is not a valley: the temples are on a skyline, and the valleys are on either side of them.

The stone

The whole plateau is a soft yellow calcarenite, a shelly limestone that cuts like cheese when freshly quarried and hardens in the air. It was dug straight out of the ridge the temples stand on, which is why the quarries, the temples and the ground are all the same colour.

Water under the ridge

The plateau is cut through by ipogei, Greek tunnels driven into the rock to collect and carry water. They are the reason a city this size could stand on dry ground, and they still feed the sunken garden at Kolymbethra, which began as a reservoir.

The coast

The sea is about three kilometres away at San Leone, a beach suburb with a long sandy shore. West of it, past the working port of Porto Empedocle, the coast turns into the white marl terraces of the Scala dei Turchi, a stepped cliff of blinding white rock above blue water.

Inland

Behind the town the land rises into dry, thinly populated hills of wheat, almond and olive, historically sulphur-mining country and now among the emptiest parts of Sicily.