Sole inhabitant of Budelli gives up battle to stay on Italian island famous for its pink sandy beaches.
An elderly hermit who has lived on the tiny Italian island of Budelli off Sardinia for the past 32 years has announced his reluctant departure after a decades-long dispute over his right to stay there.
82-year-old Mauro Morandi, who has acted as the island s caretaker since 1989, has resisted attempts to evict him by the national park which includes Budelli among its 20,000 hectares of sea and land to the north-east of Sardinia.
Morandi has defined his role as keeping tourists at bay , protecting the island s ecosystem and guarding the beach whose pink sand derives its hue from powdered fragments of corals and shells.