Flora Although there are other places in the world where you can find a lake, a volcanic crater and woods similar to these, you will not find a beech-tree growing at 500 meters of altitude and groves of turkey oaks covering the sides of the crater anywhere else. This is the distinctiveness that makes the Natural Reserve of Lake Vico an unique and unequalled area. In a radium of a few hundred meters we pass from the beechwood to the groves of turkey oaks, the chestnut groves, the rows of hazel trees with their multiform geometries, the natural meadows, and the composite vegetation covering the banks of the lake. This rapid succession of different environments offers a spectacle that changes with the passage of the seasons; the different vegetative phases of each species characterize the landscape, which changes constantly with a different colour or gradation. Perhaps, the person that enjoys this spectacle for the first time in his/her life, will be pervaded by peculiar and, at the same time, wonderful feelings probably never felt before; being able to take in an area like this with a single look, a territory that contains a pristine nature where all the elements live together in harmony. The beech-trees, the oaks, the chestnuts, the hornbeams, the maples, the manna-trees, are just some of the species that constitute these woods, once impenetrable. The Roman troops that conquered the Estruscan lands called this area "l'orrenda Sylva Cimina" ('the horrible Cimine forest'). Among the brushwood species we find the holly, the butcher's broom, the daphne laureola, the fern, the narcissus, the alpine squill, the anemone, the cyclamen, the lily and the orchid. The vast marsh with its reed-bed spanning along almost all the perimeter of the lake, is rich with willows, poplars and magnificent beds of rushes.