UKH

Hello all, 

A couple of friends and I are going to Sardinia at the beginning of October and we're going to stay in a van for part of the trip. One of the friends did a quick Google search and found that wild camping in Sardinia is illegal. Does anyone know if this applies to van camping. If van camping isn't allowed does anyone know if this is strictly enforced or whether the authorities let camper be if they are being respectful?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you 

You can't shit in a layby 'respectfully'. 

It's entirely possible to sleep in a van without shitting in laybys. 

Respectfully, you can. You take everything away with you, and leave the place as you found it.  Just like you would with anything else.

Well, respectfully, if it is against the law in the place you are visiting,to wild camp, including in vans, going to that place and disobeying that law, is not very respectful.

Have things changed over there? Twenty years ago I remember dropping Bob Bowdler off on the way to Cala Gonone and he walked/bivvied his way through the mountains to meet us there a week later. It's in the LC&CC 2004 Journal if you have it. Of course, Bob was a canny operator and kept a low profile not 'wild camping' in a van.

my advice would be to comply with all the laws in someone elses country. 

The OP's perfectly reasonable point was clearly about doing everything else respectfully short of being within the letter of the law. 

It's against the law to camp in the mountains of England and Wales but a lot of us do that without disturbing anyone or leaving a mess. I was just wondering if the laws there are like ours or if it's much stricter and zero tolerance. 

If anyone knows if there's a system similar to the French aires that would be good. 

I imagine most people on UKC would think it's acceptable to wild camp discretely above intake walls (pitch late, leave early, leave no trace) and bury an occassional turd well away from any water source. We don't tar ourselves or other "responsible" "wild" campers with the same brush as we would the large groups who turn a bit of wild land near a lake district road into a mini festival for their mates and leave litter/shit strewn around.

It seems a lot of us, myself included, are relectant to accept that van camping can be done responsibly as well as irresponsibly. Or maybe we do accept it and occasionally do it ourselves, but don't want to encourage/condone it in writing.

Well yes, but I’m not talking about where you’re camping and whether it’s against the law am I?

I’m talking about how to poop in a lay-by. This applies to anywhere. 

You may not even be camping, just caught short (happens to us all once in a while). 

And what law would that be that criminalises 'wild camping'?

You're likely to get a large fine if you do this. We saw a number of people getting fines whilst cycling in Sardinia in 2022.

In one instance we hadn't seen another human being for around 3 hours when we cycled past a van and couple who had obviously been wild camping with two policemen speaking with the occupants.

Lots of signs everywhere saying no camping and rangers patrol the countryside so I think they take it seriously 🤔

Bobs camping would be Wild Camping as opposed to Feral camping. I was chatting with a bloke in Laos, like you do, and he was Climber from Sardinia and he got rather excited about something called Wild Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selvaggio_Blu_(Sardinia), which actually sounds rather fun, and possibly something for a future trip.