18 Facts About Lampedusa

Lampedusa is the largest island of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

Name Lampedusa derives from the ancient Greek name of the island, ??pad??ssa or ?apad??ssa .

Lampedusa'storically, Lampedusa was a landing place and a maritime base for the ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Berbers.

In 1565, Don Garcia de Toledo made a brief stop at Lampedusa while leading a relief force to break the Great Siege of Malta.

The Governor of Malta, Sir Thomas Maitland, visited Lampedusa and found that Fernandez was running a business venture, so on 15 September 1814 he announced the withdrawal of British troops stationed on the island.

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Lampedusa prayed for migrants, living and dead, and denounced their traffickers.

In October 2013, the 2013 Lampedusa disaster occurred; a boat carrying over 500 migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, sank off the coast of Lampedusa with the deaths of at least 300 people.

From January to April 2015, about 1600 migrants died on the route from Libya to Lampedusa, making it the deadliest migrant route in the world.

Lampedusa is both the southernmost point and the southernmost island of Italy.

Lampedusa is a semi-arid island, dominated by a garrigue landscape, with maquis shrubland in the west.

Lampedusa geologically is part of the "Pelagian Province", a structural member of the African continent, lying on a structural high called the Lampedusa Plateau.

Lampedusa essentially is a tilted block of limestone, the highest point being on the NW coast and the lowest on the SE coast, the island being soft limestone, of a white to creamy-yellow.

From a structural point of view, Lampedusa belongs to the Pelagian Block, a foreland at the northern edge of the African plate, and is inside the Sicily Channel.

Lampedusa has a semi-arid climate characterized by very warm, humid summers, comfortable winters, powerful seasonal lag and a very small diurnal temperature range.

Fauna and flora of Lampedusa are similar to those of North Africa, with a few pelagic endemic species.

The Isola dei Conigli, close to the south coast of Lampedusa, is one of the last remaining egg-laying sites in Italy for the loggerhead sea turtle, which is endangered throughout the Mediterranean.

Waters nearby Lampedusa are the only area in the Mediterranean with sightings of pregnant great white sharks and newly born individuals.

Recent studies revealed that the waters of Lampedusa are a wintering feeding ground for the Mediterranean group of fin whales.