Parco naturale delle Alpi Marittime, Regional park in Province of Cuneo, Italy.

The Parco naturale delle Alpi Marittime is a protected regional park set in the Maritime Alps with diverse mountain terrain. The landscape includes several valleys, numerous alpine lakes, and many peaks reaching above 3000 meters (10,000 feet), connected by an extensive network of hiking paths.

The park began in 1857 as the Valdieri-Entracque royal hunting reserve of Victor Emmanuel II. It was established as the Argentera Natural Park in 1980, named after the massif at the centre of the Maritime Alps, and received the European Diploma of Protected Areas in 1993. In 1995, under Regional Law 33/1995, it merged with the Palanfrè Woods and Lakes reserve, created in 1979, taking its present name.

The valleys here link Italian and French traditions through mountain routes that people have used for centuries to trade and travel. You can see this cross-border heritage reflected in the local villages and the way communities have adapted to mountain life.

The park covers about 28,000 hectares across the upper Valle Gesso, the Valle Grande di Palanfrè and the Valletta and Reduc valleys in the Valle Stura di Demonte, in the municipalities of Aisone, Entracque, Valdieri, Roaschia and Vernante. Ten mountain huts, ten shelters and over 400 km of hiking paths serve visitors. Elevation runs from 750 m to the 3,297 m summit of the Argentera, so trails differ greatly in difficulty.

The Gélas glaciers are the southernmost in the Alps, and about eighty lakes lie within the park, nearly all of glacial origin. These small lakes silt up quickly, turning into peat bogs and then flat meadows where the stream wanders in wide meanders, as at Prà del Rasour and Piano del Valasco.