Gran Paradiso National Park

Gran Paradiso, in Italy's Graian Alps between the Aosta Valley and Piedmont, was Italy's first national park, formally established in 1922 from a royal hunting reserve that King Victor Emmanuel II had created in 1856 to protect Alpine ibex from poachers. The ibex population it exists to protect fell from about 3,000 animals at the park's founding to just 419 by 1945 under wartime pressure, before recovering to roughly 4,000 by 2005, a recovery regarded as one of the clearer conservation successes in the Alps. Covering 703 square kilometers between 800 and 4,061 meters in elevation, the park also supports chamois, marmots, wolves, lynx and more than 100 bird species across coniferous and deciduous forest, meadow, glacier and rocky terrain, and it shares a western boundary with France's Vanoise National Park, with which it coordinates management of the seasonally migrating ibex.