WATERFALL

Zompo the Schioppo is an example of a karst spring intermittent lapses annually during the summer and autumn months. The water flows from a steep limestone wall with a jump of more than 130 meters, forming the highest natural waterfall of the Apennines.
The link between the landscape of the Reserve and the element of water is so marked as to affect both the appearance as the ecosystem.
This link and the suggestion that springs did not escape the attention of visitors to the past, Questi against Alexandre Dumas, who made the commendation in their travel notes. The beech forests have on this system function “Protective”, forming with it a landscape unit that is the very image of the Reserve. The water element manifests his presence in any room of the reserve, from the highest springs located at an altitude of 1700 meters, until it reaches inhabited areas at lower altitudes.
But this visibility is only one aspect of his course: hidden from view, a branched underground hydrography linked to the widespread karst, takes shape in caves, karst valleys, wells and sinkholes, pushing between the fissured limestone that make up a large part of the framework of these mountains, escaping in some cases abundant sources such as the Pantaneccia that provides water with its water needs of the Valley Bush. Finally comes the man, creator of the spontaneous appearance less water, to intervene on the weft bank of the territory with its manufacturing footprint. His courses artificial, channels of varying size depending on the purpose, mark the territory to steal its water potential. E 'known technical capacity which in the past the man was able to channel the water for irrigation or to operate machinery. This tradition, particularly strong among the monks, survives thanks to the tiles, earth canals still used today to irrigate the cultivated, testimony of a way to intervene in the territory in a discreet way. Of greater impact is the large artificial channel created by Enel, who pours the waters of the river Lo Schioppo in a pond “load”, to finally move, through a penstock, turbines of a power plant in the territory of Morino.