The old city, which developed inside high fortifications, allured the visitor by the picturesque charm of its narrow streets, its houses to the high austere frontages and of its old bored ramparts of a door génoise. 

The Navy and her marina located downwards also form a pleasant unit, mainly the summer, when the coffees offer their accessible terraces. 

About 1540, the Republic of Genoa decides to install a fortified town in Oporto-Vecchio. Built at the top of enormous porphyry rocks, the fortifications are an effective protection against the barbaresque attacks. Génois try, to no purpose, to develop food crops but the malaria, which infests the marshes of the edge of sea, obliges the population to take refuge in the close mountains during the summer. 

Oporto-Vecchio increases despite everything, and the saline ones prove a true economic richness quickly. The “city of salt”, has 60 hectares of saline marshes located close to the mouth of Stabiacciu, its current production reaches the 1.200 tons per annum.

Today, tourism is its principal activity. Quoted of ideal holiday, Oporto-Vecchio offers a large variety of balneal, sporting or cultural leisures in decorations of dream.

 Oporto-Vecchio (Portivechju) is an old place strengthened of almost 3 hectares of surface (intramurally) protected by a belt from ramparts from pentagonal form whose edges are marked by five bastions. Intended to protect its colonizers subjected to a permanent danger from maritime or terrestrial attacks, to the liking of the invasions or wars, several times given up because of the insalubrity of the climate, the citadel is remained in its current state since the arrival of the French, in 1769. It, then, opened several breaches in its walls and began its extraordinary economic, social and demographic explosion which carried its population from 300 to 12.000 inhabitants in a little more than two centuries… 

And it is not finished, seems it.


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