Transhumance

What is transhumance?

Transhumance is the seasonal movement of herds between pastures that lie at different altitudes or in different climates. In spring and autumn herders lead their sheep, goats or cattle along traditional routes from one area to the other, on foot or on horseback, often with dogs and sometimes with their families.

The reason for the journey lies in the climate. In a Mediterranean climate the grass on the plains grows mainly in the wet winter half of the year, while summer dries the pastures out. In the mountains it is the other way round: snow lies there in winter, but in summer fresh forage grows. A herder who moves the flock between the two finds pasture all year without having to store hay for months. Transhumance thus follows a fixed yearly round between two homes.

Treccani, the great Italian encyclopaedia, describes transhumance as seasonal migrations over wide areas and with a marked difference in altitude, found in the mountain regions around the Mediterranean, from Spain to Asia Minor. In Italy the flocks spent the summer on the pastures of Abruzzo and the neighbouring uplands. In September they came down to the winter pastures of the Maremma, the Roman Campagna and the Tavoliere in Apulia, and they returned to the mountains in June. In the southern Alps the route led from the foothills up to the alpine pastures of Lombardy and Piedmont.

Routes, rules and herders' knowledge

Where herds travel the same way every year, tracks form. In southern Italy they are called tratturi: wide paths with a natural surface, worn by the herds themselves, leading from the area around L'Aquila and the Samnite mountain pastures down to the Apulian plain. Their width generally corresponded to 60 Neapolitan paces, about 111 metres, room enough for thousands of animals and for grazing on the way. In Sicily such tracks are called trazzere. Before lorries took over most of the journey, the animals walked the whole way on these paths.

The routes had their rules. In the Kingdom of Naples the Dogana delle Pecore, the sheep customs authority in Foggia, regulated transhumance exclusively and with its own jurisdiction, from the Aragonese period until the French decade at the start of the nineteenth century. For about four centuries it administered the state pastures of the Tavoliere. Its records from 1536 to 1806 are kept today in the State Archive of Foggia.

Behind the routes lies knowledge that was rarely written down: when a pasture is ready, where water can be found, how animals are kept, bred and led. This knowledge was passed on within families and route communities. Around the journeys grew a culture of its own, with food, crafts and festivals that mark the start and end of the grazing season.

A heritage of humanity

In December 2019 UNESCO added transhumance to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Italy had begun the nomination in 2018 together with Greece and Austria. In 2023 transhumance was inscribed again, now under the title Transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock and as a joint nomination of ten countries: Albania, Andorra, Austria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania and Spain.

The decision of 2023 describes the practice as the movement of herders with their animals between geographical or climatic regions, usually in spring and autumn, along traditional pastoral paths. According to the nominating countries it benefits ecosystems, preserves local breeds and improves soil fertility and biodiversity. These are statements of the nomination, not measurements; they show, however, that transhumance is now also understood as part of caring for the landscape.

Sardinia, an island of herders

In Sardinia sheep farming is part of the shape of the island. At the end of 2024 it held about 2.7 million sheep, close to half of all sheep in Italy, spread across some 15,000 farms. The average Sardinian flock is more than three times the national average. The milk becomes cheese, among it Pecorino Romano PDO, whose production area covers Sardinia, Lazio and the province of Grosseto.

For a long time herding here was also a way of moving. An anthropological study in 2018 followed the traces of transhumance in family names. It examined five villages of the Barbagia di Belvì in the mountains, Aritzo, Belvì, Desulo, Gadoni and Tonara, a traditional sheep-herding area and the starting point of the journeys to the lowlands. There transhumance ran every year along set routes from the herding areas in the mountains to the farmed plains. The surnames show marked mixing between the mountain villages of the interior and lowland villages in the south: the routes of the herds were also routes of families.

For a long time the pasture itself was held in common. The people of a village had the customary right to graze their animals, cut wood and gather acorns on the land of their territory; in Sardinia this right was called ademprivio. With the Edict of Enclosures of 6 October 1820, owners were allowed to fence land that was not burdened with such rights, and those who had grazed there often lost access. The article on the commons tells this story.

What herds do in the landscape

Many landscapes now seen as typically Mediterranean are grazed landscapes. The wooded pastures of cork oak and holm oak described in the article on silvopasture are landscapes shaped by people and herds. The animals keep the shrub layer low and the ground open, spread dung and carry seeds.

The effect is clearest with fire. A review led by Francisco Moreira concludes that social and economic change in southern Europe has pushed land cover towards higher fire hazard. Fields and pastures were abandoned, shrubs and young forest grew over them, and fuel that crops, grazing and wood cutting used to break up became continuous. The end of herding therefore also touches the question of a fire-resilient landscape.

Andalusia uses this effect on purpose. Since 2005 the regional government has paid shepherds to keep firebreaks in public forests grazed. A study by Elsa Varela and colleagues in 2018 counted about 220 shepherds keeping almost 6,000 hectares of firebreaks open and judged the scheme more efficient than clearing by machine. In Sardinia a modelling study from the University of Sassari found that forest grazing markedly reduced the simulated extent of fire, by different amounts in wet, average and dry years. A European study by Damianidis and colleagues compared fires from 2008 to 2017 with land use: agroforestry land, much of it grazed, covered 12 percent of the area but was linked to only 6 percent of fires; shrubland covered 16 percent and accounted for 41 percent. The authors name grazing as the main reason. These are correlations, not proof of cause.

When grazing does harm

The same animals that keep a landscape open can also strip it bare. The official landscape survey of the Ogliastra records that stocking densities rose sharply over the last century. It names overgrazing, together with fire and unsuitable tillage, among the reasons why much of the original cork oak and holm oak cover was lost, and it recommends reducing herds and regulating grazing. Where the woodland disappeared, macchia often stands today, which the same survey describes as a stage of degradation of the former oak woodland.

The difference lies in numbers, timing and duration. A herd left on parched pasture in summer takes the last cover and leaves the soil to the first heavy rain. Hooves on wet ground compact it. Young trees do not survive constant browsing, and where oaks are to regenerate, grazing pressure has to stay low for years. A review of grazing experiments by Briske and colleagues in 2008 found that the number of animals and the weather decided more about the state of a pasture than the grazing system chosen. Transhumance had its own answer to this: it took the animals off a pasture before it was exhausted. How this principle can be carried over to smaller areas is described in the article on managed grazing.

How Terra Humana understands transhumance

For Terra Humana transhumance shows that a Mediterranean landscape cannot be thought of without the people who use it. The wooded pastures of Sardinia, the open slopes and the routes between mountain and plain are the work of herders over many generations. Renaturation on this island therefore means taking grazing seriously as a force that shapes the landscape, without overlooking the damage it can do. The landscape survey of the Ogliastra names both, and we take both halves seriously: keeping the landscape open and the losses caused by too many animals.