Canale Granarolo Park

Description: This is not a small park area (8,300 square metres with over 500 plants), with historical-evocative interest. The gardens were in fact opened at the end of the 1970’s after the covering of the Naviglio canal that from Faenza flows towards the north before flowing into the Reno river after touching Granarolo, Bagnacavallo and Alfonsine. Today the canal has been physically reduced (both in quantity and size, much inferior to its original bearing), but correctly studied and enhanced as a place of memories and proof of the old hydraulic structure of the plain (dating back to the XVIII century). It has been completely replanted with autochthonous and/or characteristic essences of the “lower” countryside of Romagna. These essences have replaced cellulose poplar trees that for years marked the canal but were precarious trees of brief turnover and impossible to procrastinate. This imposing job, carried out also with local volunteer help, took place in the early 1990’s and therefore the Granarolo canal park (already obtained twenty years earlier with the covering of the canal around the town for hygiene purposes) was completed with an extremely long green section that goes practically from Faenza to beyond Alfonsine.
The park area is not of particular importance, if not for the lime trees considered to be “truffle rendering”, but today forms an area with the banks of the canal both above and below the town, lined with oak, ash trees, willows, elms – and other species of forest flora of the plain – together with plants of the traditional cultivated countryside such as mulberry, cherry, apple and pear trees.