The Amalfi lemon grows in a landscape as distinctive as its flavour. For nearly a thousand years, farmers have worked in harmony with nature to carve arable land from the sheer slopes of Italy's Amalfi Coast, planting lemon groves, olives and vines along narrow ribbons of stone-walled terraces that cling to the mountainsides. Farmers climb across wooden trellises, or pergolas, to tend to their lemon crops, earning the nickname "flying farmers" for their gravity-defying harvesting.

Coveted for its heady fragrance and sweet, juicy flesh, the Amalfi lemon is both a culinary treasure and the cornerstone of a living heritage. Refined over centuries, the lemon gardens are a model of Mediterranean mountain agriculture – blending ingenuity and tradition, protecting against landslides, sustaining livelihoods and binding people and land together.

The lemon that shaped a coastline

First introduced to the Amalfi Coast in the early Middle Ages through Arab trade, the lemon initially found purpose as a medicine. Sailors sought them out to stave off scurvy on long voyages. By the 1400s, Amalfi lemons anchored a flourishing maritime trade that tied the region to cities across Italy and the rest of Europe.

Over time, the lemon became more than cargo: it became a marker of identity. Today, the Sfusato Amalfitano variety is inseparable from the character of the Amalfi Coast. Sweet enough to eat raw like an apple, it perfumes pastries, flavours pastas and is distilled into limoncello, the region's signature liqueur. It also underpins local livelihoods, as agritourism brings visitors into the groves for lemon tours, culinary workshops and a lemon museum that blends agriculture, hospitality and tradition, helping small scale farms endure modern pressures.

The Sfusato Amalfitano itself is the result of centuries of local adaptation, uniquely adapted to steep slopes and sea air. Together with surrounding woodlands, these mosaiced gardens nurture an agrobiodiversity that ensures food security and ecological resilience in a fragile and high-slope setting.

The system behind the fruit

On the Amalfi Coast, being a lemon farmer requires far more than a green thumb. To tend the groves, one must also be a stonemason, a woodworker and a water engineer.

The system is rooted in knowledge passed down through generations. Families still manage the gardens by hand, drawing on seasonal rhythms, pruning cycles and the microclimates sustained by terraces, pergolas and cisterns – the backbone of the Amalfi lemon system.

Take the pergola for example. Crafted from chestnut wood cut in nearby forests, farmers lash lemon branches to its poles, keeping fruit within reach while preventing the heavy loads from snapping limbs.

Equally vital are the terraces – thousands of them framed by dry-stone walls ranging from three to seven meters in height. Built without cement, they allow water and air to circulate, keeping soil healthy while holding the mountainsides in place. Water channels and cisterns capture sudden downpours and store water for the dry months, buffering the groves against both drought and flood- a resilience that grows ever more critical as the climate shifts.

"When I was young, it was normal to have a gentle rain most summer afternoons," recalls Gino Amatruda, a third-generation lemon farmer in the Valle delle Ferriere. "Now it comes all at once—or not at all. And when it does, it's so fast the soil can't absorb it." The terrace system, he explains, helps absorb and channel that force, turning torrential rainfall into a resource rather than a threat.

Yet the same terraces that protect the land can also endanger it. Carefully maintained, they stabilise the hillsides; left untended, they can crumble, unleashing landslides. "We work with nature," Gino says, "but if no one guides it, nature will take back what it once claimed. The Amalfi Coast would never be the same if we abandoned our lemon terraces."

Tradition under threat

Amalfi's groves are the only system in Italy that combines terraces and pergolas to grow lemons – a method as ingenious as it is demanding. Farmers still harvest by hand and haul baskets weighing up to 70 kilos along mountain paths hundreds of metres above the sea.

Maintaining the pergolas and walls is costly and unrelenting, and many groves have been abandoned or sold off over the past fifty years. The "flying farmers" are now among the last guardians of the Amalfi lemons, their traditions threatened by rising costs, shifting demographics and a changing climate.

"Whole families used to live off lemons," says Gino. "Now it is so difficult. Not many young people want to continue."

In August 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recognized the Amalfi Lemon Gardens as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), placing its terraces and pergolas among the world's most valuable farming landscapes.

The designation is more than symbolic: it acknowledges that this intricate system is not only a cultural treasure and agricultural heritage but also a model of resilience worth protecting.

To Gino, the designation couldn't come at a better time. He hopes that it will help young people fall in love with lemons again and return to Amalfi's terraces. The GIAHS designation, he says, will help visitors and residents alike remember that the Amalfi coast isn't just about beaches, but a part of a global movement and network for resilient and sustainable farming practices.

With FAO's recognition, the Amalfi's farming story now has a global stage. The lemon gardens embody more than cultivation: they are a vital ecosystem that sustains the environment, conserves biodiversity and strengthens food culture. Amalfi's lemons are a demonstration of the interwoven layers of nature, culture and community—and the resilience that comes from living in balance with the land.

The story and photos can be found here: https://www.fao.org/newsroom/story/the-amalfi-lemon-and-its-layered-resilient-landscape/en