Syracuse Geography

Syracuse occupies the corner where Sicily turns from its Ionian coast toward Africa, and the site is one of the best natural harbours in the Mediterranean.

Ortigia

The original city is an island about a kilometre long and a few hundred metres wide, separated from the mainland by a channel narrow enough to bridge in a few paces. That is the whole reason Syracuse is here: a defensible island with fresh water on it, closing off a deep bay. The Porto Grande behind it is a wide sheltered basin, which is what allowed a Greek colony to become a naval power.

Fresh water on an island

The Fonte Aretusa is a freshwater spring rising on Ortigia a few metres from salt water, which in antiquity was remarkable enough to attach a myth to and practical enough to make the island habitable. Papyrus grows around it, as it does along the Ciane river across the bay — among the very few places it grows in Europe.

The limestone plateau

Behind the city the land rises into the Hyblaean plateau, a mass of soft white limestone. The Greeks quarried it for the city and left the latomie, deep rectangular pits with sheer walls, now sunk gardens full of citrus and fig. The same rock is cut by deep river gorges inland, and the walls of the Anapo gorge at Pantalica carry thousands of chambered tombs cut into the cliffs.

The coast

South of the city the Plemmirio peninsula has clear water over limestone and a marine protected area. Beside the port, by contrast, a small system of brackish salt pans survives as a nature reserve and a stopping point for migrating birds — a remnant of the old salt workings, squeezed between the city and the water.