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Ostuni to Lecce: the Slow Road Along the Adriatic

By Antonio Marchese · Published 26 August 2026 · 6 min read

Ostuni and Lecce are the two towns most people put at either end of a Puglia trip, and the road between them is usually treated as dead time. It is not a long drive: straight through on the main roads it runs about an hour and a quarter. But the coast it skirts holds the wildest protected shore in the region, the point where the greatest Roman road finally ran out of land and the last surviving piece of a wetland that once stretched the whole way from Brindisi to Otranto. Here is how I would break the journey, and why I think it deserves a day rather than a transfer.

Carovigno and Torre Guaceto

Carovigno is about 10 km down the road from Ostuni, a quiet white town with a Norman-origin castle, and almost nobody stops for the town. They stop for what is on its doorstep. Torre Guaceto is a WWF-managed state nature reserve and marine protected area, roughly 1,200 hectares of dunes, wetland and old olive groves behind some eight kilometres of shore, named after the watchtower built there in 1567.

The name is older than the tower. It comes from the Arabic Gaw sit, “place of fresh water”, recorded by the geographer al-Idrisi in 1164 for the springs that still feed the wetland. Protection came slowly: a marine protected area in 1991, a state nature reserve in 2000. The part you feel is that cars are kept out. You leave the car at the reserve gate and walk or cycle in, which is why the beach behind those dunes looks nothing like the lido strips further up the coast.

Brindisi, where the Appian Way ran out

Another 25 km and you are in Brindisi, which I will not oversell: it is a working port, not a postcard town. Give it an hour and it repays you. Walk up from the harbour to the Roman column at the top of the staircase, the traditional end of the Via Appia, the road that started in Rome and stopped here because the land did. Virgil died in this town in 19 BC. The road itself became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Here is the detail that makes the rest of the drive feel different. There were once two columns. The second collapsed in 1528, and its stone was carried to Lecce, where it was raised again to hold the statue of Sant’Oronzo in the main square. So the last leg of this drive follows a piece of masonry that made the same journey five centuries ago. When you reach Piazza Sant’Oronzo at the end of the day, you are looking at the other half of what you saw above the harbour at lunchtime.

If you want a swim rather than a column, the sand starts about twenty minutes north of the city, back inside the reserve: Punta Penna Grossa is 1.4 km of pale sand roughly 15 km from Brindisi, shallow and clear.

San Cataldo and the Cesine, the last stretch

Most people drive the final 35 km straight into Lecce. The better ending swings out to the coast first. San Cataldo sits about 10 km east of the city and is the best known of Lecce’s five marinas, close enough that locals simply call it the sea of the Lecce people. There is a lighthouse, a small marina and something older: the emperor Hadrian built the first harbour here in the 2nd century AD, when Lecce was the Roman colony of Lupiae, and its remains are still in the water.

Just south along the same low, sandy coast is the reserve of Le Cesine, and it is the reason this stretch stayed empty long enough to survive. Until the early 1900s the whole strip from San Cataldo down to Otranto was almost uninhabited, marshy and malarial, and it was drained at the end of the 19th century to make it liveable. What you see now is what escaped that drainage. In 1971 it was recognised at Ramsar as a wetland of international importance, in 1979 it became a WWF oasis and in 1980 a ministerial decree made it a state nature reserve with WWF Italia managing it.

Stand on the dune there and the geography of the whole drive makes sense: ponds and pine behind you, a thin strip of sand, then the Adriatic. This is the last piece of a wetland that once ran unbroken from Brindisi to Otranto, and you have just driven the length of where the rest of it used to be.

Then it is twenty minutes inland to Lecce. One practical note for the arrival: the whole old town is a permanent ZTL, so leave the car outside it, at Foro Boario or Piazza Mazzini, and walk in. Where to sleep at either end is covered in our guide to where to stay in Puglia.

Ostuni to Lecce at a glance

Ostuni to Lecce FAQ

How long does the drive from Ostuni to Lecce take?

Straight through on the main roads it is about an hour and a quarter. Taken as this page suggests, with Torre Guaceto, Brindisi and a stop on the coast below Lecce, it fills a comfortable day and can be stretched over two.

Can you do this route without a car?

Partly. Ostuni, Carovigno, Brindisi and Lecce all sit on the Adriatic regional line, so the towns are easy. What the train cannot reach is the point of the drive: Torre Guaceto, San Cataldo and the Cesine all need wheels or a summer bus. See our guide to getting around Puglia.

Where is the best swim between Ostuni and Lecce?

Punta Penna Grossa, inside the Torre Guaceto reserve: 1.4 km of pale sand about 15 km from Brindisi, with cars kept back from the dunes. It is the reason to make the detour rather than a consolation for it.

Is Brindisi worth stopping for on the way?

For an hour, yes. It is a working port rather than a postcard town, but the Roman column above the harbour is the end of the Appian Way, and the story it carries runs on to Lecce. Read our Brindisi guide before you decide how long to give it.

Which way round should you drive it?

Ostuni first, Lecce last. Ostuni is a morning town, all glare and white lime, while Lecce’s baroque is at its best in the late afternoon when the stone goes gold. Doing it in reverse works, but you lose that.

Antonio Marchese · Founder & Puglia local
Raised in the province of Brindisi, 30 years in Puglia. About this site

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