Tours to Etna are the main adventures on Sicily. The most popular is a walking tour or tracking. During such a tour the tourists go up to Etna and enjoy its moon-like scenery of lava and boulders. Those who saw a film “The Lord of the Ring” will notice the similarity between the slopes of the volcano and the foot of the Orodruin Mountain.
The tourists don’t go up the whole route on foot. In some places they use the rope-way. The average price for such a tour for 4 people is about 200 Euros.
The best tracking can be organized by the guides who studied or are still studying geology and volcanology. They can tell the tourists a lot of facts about the past and the present of the volcano. These are the stories about lots of eruptions of Etna and about the destructions which happened as a result of them. The route includes the visit to the buried under lava village Piano Provenzana. These are also the stories about “the life” of the volcano which adds emotions to an excursion and makes the tour a sort of a heroic event. The most adventurous is a night ascent when the tourists can see scarlet flows of lava through the cracks in the crust of the volcano.
For those who are not ready for such a heroic deed and can’t or don’t want to go up 2700m on foot (it is the maximum height for tracking groups) there is an opportunity to go up to Etna by jeep. Jeep tours to Etna are offered by many tourist firms in Catania and in other places in Sicily. The cost of such a tour is about 40 Euros per person. If you go up by jeep the maximum height will be 2900m. The tourist routes to the crater of the volcano are prohibited now for the safety of the tourists.
Not only hiking tours to Etna are popular among the tourists. Circumetnea train is one more popular attraction among those, who want to go up to the volcano. This old train will take tourists round the villages at the foot of Etna. Its route starts in Catania. The train stops at the most interesting places, for example, in Randazzo with its narrow but cozy medieval Italian streets, in Linguaglossa, known for its Ethnography Museum, in Dzhiarro, where there is a unique museum, the exposition of which includes hundreds of sculpture dramatizations of Christmas Eve (presepiali). Circumetnea train also goes through the picturesque natural park near Etna, the territory of which is about 58 000 hectares.
