Gourmet Walking in Puglia: Inside Our 9-Day Small Group Tour

Puglia is what Tuscany was thirty years ago — Italy before the queues — and the best way to meet it is on foot with a fork in hand. Our nine-day gourmet walking tour through Italy’s heel pairs easy-to-moderate morning walks with the region’s real star: food that never travels far from where it grew. Here’s what the trip is actually like.

The shape of a day

Mornings are for walking: eight to fourteen kilometres on farm lanes and coastal paths, between dry-stone walls and thousand-year-old olive trees, with a guide who knows which gate leads to whose orchard. By early afternoon you’re at a long table — a masseria farmhouse, a family cantina — for the kind of lunch that explains why Puglia feeds Italy. Afternoons are unhurried: a swim, a village wander, nothing at all. This is walking in service of eating, not the other way around.

Where you walk

The Itria Valley: the postcard Puglia of trulli — the whitewashed cone-roofed houses of Alberobello and Locorotondo (pictured). Ostuni and the coast: the white city on its hill, then paths down through ancient olive groves to the Adriatic. Matera: just across the Basilicata border, the cave city that rearranges everyone’s sense of how old Europe is.

What you eat (the honest highlight)

Orecchiette made in front of you by hands that have made it daily for fifty years; burrata that has travelled four kilometres, not four days; primitivo and negroamaro in the vineyards that grow them; olive oil tastings that permanently raise your standards. Cooking is part of the itinerary, not a gimmick — you’ll leave able to reproduce at least one lunch.

Who this tour suits

Walkers of ordinary good fitness — if a 10–12 km undulating walk sounds like a pleasant morning, you’re fit enough (see our guide to walking holiday fitness grades). Small group means genuinely small, luggage moves by van, and solo travellers settle in fast — food tables do that.

When to go

May, June, September and October: warm seas, mild walking temperatures, and the harvest calendar working in your favour — spring artichokes and fresh peas one end, wine harvest and new-press oil the other. July and August are for beaches, not walking.

Your questions answered

How much walking per day?

Two to four hours, mornings, easy-to-moderate grades with van support available. Every day has a shorter option.

Is Puglia really less crowded than Tuscany?

Outside August, markedly. You’ll share Alberobello with day-trippers at noon and have Locorotondo’s lanes nearly to yourself by five.

Can dietary requirements be handled?

Puglia’s cuisine is naturally vegetable-forward and our hosts are used to everything — tell us at booking and lunches simply arrive right.

Curious about dates and the full day-by-day? See our Walking & Hiking collection or ask the Pack Ya Bags team for the current Puglia departures.

Image: Slow Active Tours