2 – Palermo Rock Climbing Area

Rising up within the city of Palermo is the mountain of Monte Pellegrino, and is the largest climbing area in Sicily. This mountain is over 600m high and extends from south to north for several kilometres, offering a continuous sequence of limestone walls exposed on every side. The majority of the climbing is on the west side of the mountain and in all there are 9 major crags, offering single pitch and multi-pitch routes up to 200m long. There are 100’s of sport routes here, as well as long classic routes, making it the most important rock climbing area in southern Italy. However there are still enormous possibilities for new routes and long stretches of the wall are still untouched.

To the north of Palermo and rising from the sea is Monte Gallo. It is an isolated mountain consisting of a number of different peaks, with some walls up to 400m high. The rugged nature of the mountain and its steep walls are similar to the Dolomites! All of the routes are multi-pitch giving big wall bolted routes up to 370m long on good quality limestone rock.

3 – Messina Rock Climbing Area

In the northeast side of Sicily the rock climbing around Messina consists of 11 separate limestone crag. Here there is a combination of sea cliffs and multi-pitch bolted routes up to 150m long. The largest crag is at Castelmola, near Taormina, which offers nearly 80 single pitch sport routes across a good selection of grades.

4 – Siracusa – Ragusa Rock Climbing Area

In the southeast part of Sicily there is a large concentration of crags between Siracusa and Ragusa. This area is made up of the Monti Iblei plateau with many cantons up to 200m deep. The climbing is mainly single-pitch sport routes that offer a good selection of routes across all grades.

However at Monti Climiti there are bolted routes up to 100m long with 9 different crags spread out on 3 sides of the mountain. Generally there are not many routes established at each crag, and the number of bolted routes varies from 7 to 38. However the crags are separated by only a few minutes’ drive from each other with only a short walk to each crag. There is a good selection of single pitch routes as well as bolted multi-pitch routes across all grades on limestone rock.

The coastline around Siracusa is the best to go Deep Water Soloing (DWS) in Sicily, though this has only recently been developed.