The flamingo’s newcomer status in the Venetian Lagoon is perhaps best underscored by the absence of a word in the local dialect for the striking birds.
The pale pink creatures, known as “fenicotteri” in Italian, are now appearing in Venice in unprecedented numbers.
The surge is attributed to ongoing ecological initiatives aimed at restoring damaged wetlands, which are expanding their habitat and could potentially encourage them to nest within the lagoon.
Flamingos, which are more commonly associated with nesting sites in Spain and France, first began to appear in the vast Venetian Lagoon in the early 2000s.
Their presence was primarily noted in the remote fishing valleys and mudflats of the lagoon’s outer reaches, with sightings in the historic, tourist-frequented centre of Venice remaining a rare occurrence.
Environmentalists say their arrival in Venice as the European flamingo’s range expands is a sign of the lagoon’s health and suitability as a feeding ground.
In 2025, the number of wintering flamingos in Venice peaked at a record of nearly 24,000. That is 6,000 more than the previous year, numbers “that position the Venetian Lagoon as one of the most important wintering spots in its entire habitat range”, said ornithologist Alessandro Sartori.
Mr Sartori surveys the lagoon weekly by boat for signs of nesting, which would indicate a self-sustaining Venetian colony. So far there are no fresh signs after two nesting attempts, in 2008 and 2013, in northern lagoon fishing valleys suffered serious setbacks, including violent hail that killed dozens of birds.
More than 90 per cent of the birds counted in last year’s census were in the northern lagoon, which contains a large area of natural salt marsh. The flamingos are also attracted by the traditional fishing valleys, semi-natural embanked wetlands that provide abundant food but can also bring them into conflict with human activity.
A project to reconstruct salt marshes in the more isolated southern lagoon — past the historic centre and the industrial port — raises prospects that flamingo numbers will increase there as well by offering a new habitat in an area of the lagoon where wetland erosion has been especially severe. It could also draw the birds away from competing human uses in the north.
The Venetian Lagoon, covering an expanse of 550 square kilometres (more than 200 square miles), was originally nearly half salt marsh. Today the area of salt marsh — or “barene” in the Venetian dialect — is just about 7 per cent, about half of it reconstructed, said Jane da Mosto, the executive director of We Are Here Venice, the local partner in the EU’s €23.6 million euro (£20.4 million), five-year WaterLANDS project to restore wetlands across Europe.
The damage is especially stark in the central and southern lagoon, due to the combination of natural erosion and the dredging of shipping channels to access the Marghera industrial port in the 1960s.
“And since then, there’s been much more widespread erosion and loss of sediments from the lagoon to the point that Venice is now on a trajectory to becoming a marine bay,” said Ms da Mosto. The wetlands reconstruction project “is specifically to show that it’s possible to address this trend and change the course of history”.
Rebuilding the salt marshes increases the lagoon’s ability to capture carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and driver of climate change, and mitigates the effects of rising sea levels. But Ms da Mosto said much larger areas would need to be restored to produce meaningful climate benefits. The goal of the EU project is to make salt marsh reconstruction scalable.
