It was founded in 1991, is the second largest park in Italy in size and now includes a large surface area of the southern Campania, bounded on the north by the plain of Paestum, on the east by the Vallo di Diano, west and south from the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The entire park is also very diverse; includes mountain environments with peaks ranging from 1130 of Mount Stella to 1898 meters of Mount Cervati, hilly areas and marine environments of great beauty and variety.
The nature is still wild and pristine, especially in remote areas, where the roads passable by car are rare.
Here it seems that the time has magically stopped decades ago, making the tourist feel a strange sense of unreality and memories of ancient civilizations and cities disappeared.
The National Park of Cilento and Vallo di Diano and Alburni was established in 1991, while in 1995 it established the authority for its management. The protected area of about 36 000 hectares, entirely within the province of Salerno, was subsequently extended to bring the surface to 181 048 hectares. Corresponds today to the southern part of the province, including the plain north of the Sele, Basilicata to the east and south, and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the West. Includes, in whole or in part, the territories of 80 Municipalities and 8 Mountain Communities.
Since 1998, UNESCO World Heritage (with the archaeological sites of Paestum and Velia and the Certosa di Padula), Biosphere Reserve since 1997 and since 2010 is the first Italian national park to become a Geopark. The park headquarters is in Vallo della Lucania.
The need to protect the Cilento by speculation and by a destructive mass tourism had already been mentioned since 1973 (International Conference on Mediterranean coastal parks, Castellabate). A first result was the establishment by the Ministry of Environment of two nature reserves, respectively, on the mountain and river Cervati Heat, for a total of 36,000 hectares.
The park was created in 1991. Subsequently approved measures for the perimeter and with the zoning ordinance of the Ministry of Environment December 4, 1992. In February 2011 he also becomes the first national park to have a library digitized, with the networking and multimedia products of twenty thousand volumes in the library of the park.