The best hiking app for Pollino National Park
Pollino is the largest national park in Italy, straddling Calabria and Basilicata, crowned by Serra Dolcedorme (2,267 m) and famous for the Bosnian pine — the wind-sculpted pino loricato that grows nowhere else in the country. It's remote, high and wild, with long approaches, sparse waymarking and the thin mobile coverage of Italy's deep south.
NomadTracks is made for country like this: a private recorder that keeps your line and your map alive with no signal at all.
Download NomadTracks free on the App Store
What the walking is like
Pollino walking means long ascents through beech forest to open summit ridges, isolated ancient loricato pines on the crests, and big, committing days between few road heads. The trail network is real but under-signed, and the sheer scale of the park makes a recorded track and a trustworthy offline map genuinely reassuring.
The map that actually helps here
Carry the park and CAI maps — and bring them into NomadTracks. A georeferenced GeoPDF or GeoTIFF imports and aligns in one tap; a photographed or scanned paper CAI sheet or park map georeferences in-app with a few control points and a metre-level accuracy readout. Your position then sits live on the official cartography, fully offline.
Offline, private, all day
On a Serra Dolcedorme ridge there is no coverage, and NomadTracks needs none: recording, tracks and custom maps all run on-device with the radio off. Big Pollino days fit one iPhone charge with the screen off, or record from the Apple Watch — and nothing is ever uploaded, with no account to create.
Related
- The NomadTracks hiking tracker — all the features
- Use park & area maps offline with a live GPS position
- How to georeference a paper map
- A recorded example: Dürrensee to the Drei Zinnen in the Dolomites