We start walking under the rain and knowing it’ll rain more. A passerby looks curiously at our backpacks and asks: “You pick this weather for a stroll? These are things to do in summer.”
It's one of the most gorgeous landscapes of our trip and a storm is awaiting. But no matter: the countryside, with bad weather, reveals its most raw and hidden face.
Only when the sky opens up we stop and observe huge mountains of gypsum coming out of the earth.
What is gypsum?
It’s a mineral dissolved in sea water. When the latter evaporates, it gets deposited on the sea floor turning into rock. These rocks formed between 6 and 5 million years ago, when the Mediterranean Sea faced extinction.
Why?
The Strait of Gibraltar was restricted. Without water from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean slowly evaporated. Gypsum formed in shallow seas, sea salt in deep seas. Sicily is the only place in which you can find both exposed on land and therefore it’s studied by geologists from all over the world.
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