Agriturismo Lago Le Tamerici - Agricampeggio - Coltano - Pisa

.The first written mention of Coltano is in a document dated 30 April 780 filed at the State Archives in Pisa. In the document, a Pisan nobleman asked the monks of San Savino Abbey for permission to go otter hunting near the church of San Quirico di Coltano. After changing hands many times, in 1562 pope Pius VI transferred the entire property of Coltano to San Savino Abbey, and more specifically to the military order of the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano.
Later, in 1586, Coltano passed to the Medici family and Prince Anthony expressed his intension to have a hunting and fishing residence built there. In April 1587, Grand Duke I started building the villa, designed by the famed architect Bernardo Buontalenti, which today stands in the middle of the old town.
The main activity of the Coltano estate was horse breeding, hunting and fishing. Most of the dry land was grassland used as pasture and farmland. The woods, mainly oak trees, elm oaks and British oaks, formed created a line around dry lands stopping the horses, which lived in the wild, from wandering from the pastures into the marshes.
The estate was greatly improved by the Lorena family, and particularly by the works carried out by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo I: from 1739 to 1788 several bridges were built and many trenches and channels were opened.
A pine tree-rowed lane (approximately 6 kilometres long) once known as Vione dei Pini (today called Via della Sofina) was built then.
The lane went from the Coltano villa to San Piero a Grado.After the unification of Italy, estate become property of the crown under Vittorio Emanuele II in 1860 and a royal hunting estate for the enjoyment of the king and the royal family.

.The reclaiming radically transformed the landscape by drying up the marshes and making the whole area fit for farming, in other words tillable and profitable. At the end of works, the Coltano estate become characterised by a close-knit weave of trenches: the shallow water trenches (which collect the water from the soil and are under sea level) and the deep water trenches (which the water over sea level). The shallow waters flow to three pumps from where they are naturally diverted to the sea

The land where the “Lago Le Tamerici” Country Farm Camping Site & Restaurant stands is situated at minus two metres under sea level. It was purchased in 1972 by Furio Salvadori and become part of the family’s farm estate. Sand was excavated from the subsoil creating what today is the lake.
Until 2002 the lake was used for fishing and the surrounding land was used for grazing.

The Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli Regional Park authorities included the farm in the scope of a requalification, valorisation and reforestation scheme of the district, an initiative which spurred the creation of the today’s Country Farm Camping Site & Restaurant