Gole dell'Alcantara, Volcanic canyon in Castiglione di Sicilia, Italy.

Gole dell'Alcantara is a canyon between Castiglione di Sicilia and Motta Camastra where the Alcantara River has cut into basalt lava. Its walls rise up to 25 metres and narrow to 2 metres, exposing pentagonal and hexagonal columns formed by rapid cooling. The most famous gorge, over 6 km long in the Fondaco Motta area, is easily walkable for its first 3 km.

The canyon formed when lava flows from the nearby volcano met the cold river water and cooled rapidly, creating the characteristic columns. Over millennia, the water carved deeper into the frozen rock, shaping the walls that stand today.

The gorge has served as a film set, appearing in Ettore Scola's L'arcidiavolo (1966) and Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales (2015). Theatre companies have staged evening performances on the riverbanks, including Dante's Inferno directed by Guglielmo Ferro in 2008 and again by Giovanni Anfuso in 2023, and Homer's Odyssey directed by Giovanni Anfuso in 2019 and 2025.

You can reach the canyon floor by a path or an elevator, and sturdy footwear is necessary because the water flows over rounded stones. The best time to visit is in the morning, when the sun is low enough to light up the interior of the canyon.

The gorge walls are made of columnar basalt from Etna flows of the last 8,000 years, and the most recent flow produced the visible columns. The columns take different shapes along the walls: stacked "pile" forms, "harp" forms and radial arrangements, with vertical "organ pipe" columns reaching about 30 m in places.