Scoglitti, the last dune that resists is polluted

In Scoglitti, on the Cammarana seafront, still stands one of the last dunes that survived the bulldozers. A small natural miracle just twenty meters from the shoreline, a fragment of a coastal ecosystem that should be cherished like a treasure. Instead, today it appears as a wounded place: plastic everywhere, bags blown by the wind, scattered waste, and even an abandoned mattress as if it were an improvised dump. This is the scenario reported by the association Terre Pulite, which has been documenting the degradation for months without receiving any responses.

Coastal dunes are not just a detail of the landscape: they are natural barriers that protect the coastline from erosion, retain sand carried by the wind, and host plant and animal species that would not survive elsewhere. They are fragile ecosystems, precious, irreplaceable. Yet, here they are left to rot under the weight of neglect.

The paradox is even more evident when considering that this stretch of beach is one of the places where, almost every year, nests of the loggerhead sea turtle Caretta caretta are discovered. A phenomenon that led a former mayor to ironically and in amazement call them “turtles with radar”, because they return to lay their eggs in the same spots, as if they recognize the way home. But what home can they find today, if the dune that should welcome them is buried under waste?

Terre Pulite reports that the situation has been ongoing for months. No one intervenes, no one cleans up, no one seems to feel the responsibility to protect what remains of a habitat that elsewhere would be considered a natural monument. And perhaps that is precisely the point: these dunes should be valued, told, protected, transformed into symbolic places of the environmental wealth of the area. They should become educational spaces, observation points, living testimonies of how nature can endure, if only given a chance.

Instead, today they are the symbol of an abandonment that makes noise. An abandonment that risks erasing forever a piece of coastal identity, a heritage that belongs to everyone.

The complaint from Terre Pulite is not just an accusation: it is a call. An invitation to look at what we have right before our eyes and too often ignore. To understand that environmental protection is not a luxury, but a duty. To recognize that beauty, when not protected, is lost. And when it is lost, it does not return.