Alimuri Beach

Since the beginning, Meta inhabitants distinguished themselves as anglers and expert sailors, but they found their maximum recognition and fortune as shipowners, becoming famous all over the world.

A propitious environment is the author of the evolution of this territory: in the past, an old and now gone deep valley with its creek appeared in this area. It was through the river that oak and pine trunks, raw materials and debris descended along the valley and from the hills behind. This movement initially created a fertile context for the first activities of the seventeenth-century anglers, who started to put up their boats on the beach of Alimuri. Gradually, they started to handle the tuff, then to exploit the already existing caves as warehouses for their boats.

A real fishing village started to grow in this area of the Meta coast, along with activities, new roads, more inhabitants and the church, which collected prayers, offerings and vows. The anglers of Meta soon began to exploit raw materials that came down from the valley through the creek and experienced a second production phase, developing resourcefully new skills. They developed the art of the axe’s masters, building increasingly bigger boats, but always sailing ones.

On the other hand, there were the women who sewed, mended and stretched the sails in the large courtyards that can still be admired inside the buildings of the historic centre.

Quickly, the industrialization of this activity grew that much, that the Meta Shipyards saw the light becoming famous all over the world. In 1860, those of Alimuri counted on eight construction sites with the production of hundreds of ships.

Shipbuilding was also linked to the production of the so-called galletta, the “sea biscuit”, brought on ships to supply the merchant ships on their long journeys.

However, as often happened in those days, the working hours opened and closed around the “house of the houses“, a small church located on the beach, where they said their prayers to protect the sailors, or, on bad days, cry the many who have never returned. A church, the Purgatory Souls, dedicated to the souls of those sailors and anglers who died at sea.

Today, it remains very little of the church. However, in some prints of the time, the Alimuri beach is described as Marina di Meta of the purgatory.