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The Mediterranean monk seal Monachus monachus (Hermann, 1779) is the most endangered pinniped in the world. In addition, its presence has not been documented for about two decades in the Apulian Region and about 10 years along the Italian coastline. In this work, we aim to describe an exceptional and well-documented observation of a subadult specimen of Monachus monachus occurring during the last days of January 2020 in the Salento peninsula (Apulia Region, Italy) for the first time after two decades of local extinction in the south-western Adriatic Sea. ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ © Zangaro F et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.