King Victor Emmanuel II declared this stretch of the Graian Alps his personal hunting reserve in 1856, specifically to protect the Alpine ibex, which by then had been hunted down to perhaps 60 surviving animals across the entire range, prized for supposed medicinal properties in charms cut from a small bone near the ibex heart.
His grandson Victor Emmanuel III donated the land to the Italian state in 1922, making it, at just shy of its centenary, Italy's oldest national park, and the same paths the royal guards once cut to move between hunting stations now form part of 724 kilometers of marked trails. From the village of Cogne, the most popular base on the park's Aosta Valley side, trails climb through larch forest toward alpine meadows where ibex still graze in view of hikers, beneath Gran Paradiso itself, at 4,061 meters the only summit entirely on Italian soil to clear 4,000 meters.
