Throughout the Mediterranean region and north to Switerland.
A distinctive reddish-purple plant whose flowers have a long pointed lip, a hood ('galea') formed by the sepals and a pointed floral bract of variable length. The relative lengths of this bract and the hood, together with other characters, have been used to separate the species into several subspecies in the eastern Mediterranean, but this web site does not differentiate between them because intermediates are very frequent. The species is fairly common in open grassland, scrub etc from 0 - 1000 m altitude.
All photograph, Cyprus 2004.
© Paul Hackney
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