Melendugno

Melendugno is one of those Puglian towns whose name barely registers even for people who’ve spent time in the Salento, and yet its coastline — a run of frazioni including San Foca and Torre Sant’Andrea — produces some of the most striking rock formations on the entire Adriatic side of the peninsula. We came for Torre Sant’Andrea specifically, drawn by a photograph of a sea arch someone had shown us on a phone screen weeks earlier, and found the reality more jagged and more alive than the photograph had suggested.

The coast here doesn’t offer the long sandy stretches you find further south at Pescoluse; instead it’s a run of low limestone cliffs, sea stacks, and narrow inlets, the water working its way into and through the rock over millennia to produce arches, blowholes, and small hidden coves accessible only by picking a careful path over the stone. We scrambled down to one such cove late in the afternoon, the light turning the pale rock a deep gold, and swam in a channel barely wider than a swimming lane, the current from the open sea pushing gently against us the whole time.

San Foca, a few kilometres north, functions as the more conventional resort of the two frazioni — a small harbour, a promenade, a cluster of restaurants serving the evening crowd that gathers to watch the sunset over the water, which here, unusually for the Adriatic side, has an open western aspect that gives genuinely good sunset colour rather than the flat evening light you get on most of this coast. We had dinner on the harbour one night, a plate of raw sea urchin that the waiter split open at the table with theatrical care, and watched the fishing boats come in as the light dropped.

The inland town of Melendugno itself, a short drive back from the coast, carries none of the seaside polish — it’s a working agricultural town, olive groves running right up to its edges, with a modest historic centre and a Wednesday market that draws farmers from the surrounding countryside rather than tourists. We stopped there for coffee on our way inland one morning and ended up talking, through a mix of broken Italian and gestures, with a stallholder about the olive harvest that was still months away, who seemed genuinely pleased that anyone visiting the coast had bothered to come see where the actual town was.

When to go: June and September are ideal for the coastal frazioni, with clearer water and manageable crowds at Torre Sant’Andrea and San Foca. Sunset in San Foca is worth timing a dinner around regardless of season; the inland town is pleasant year-round but especially so during the autumn olive harvest.