🇮🇹 Italy · Islands (Sicily and Sardinia)
Sardinia is an island that surprises you: most people associate it only with its postcard beaches — and it has some of the most beautiful in the world, with white sand and a sea in every shade of turquoise — but it is much more than that. It is an ancient, proud land, with a strong identity, a language of its own and a wild interior of mountains, oak woods and shepherds' villages where time seems to have stopped. And it holds an archaeological mystery unique in the world: the nuraghi, thousands of stone towers raised more than three thousand years ago by a civilisation that left no writing and about which we still know little.
In Sardinia the sophistication of the Costa Smeralda — with its yachts, its exclusive coves and its luxury prices — sits alongside the sheer authenticity of the Barbagia interior, where you eat strong cheeses, roast suckling pig (porceddu) and pane carasau, ancestral festivals are held and Sardinian is spoken. There is Alghero, a walled city where Catalan is still spoken thanks to an old Aragonese settlement; there are the limestone fjords of the Gulf of Orosei, with coves you can only reach by boat or on foot; and there is protected nature, with crystal-clear water, that everyone has to look after.
This guide covers the essentials of the island with a practical eye: Cagliari, the Costa Smeralda and the La Maddalena archipelago, Cala Gonone and the Gulf of Orosei, Alghero and the north-west, the Su Nuraxi nuraghe at Barumini and the most famous beaches. We explain how to get there and get around (with a car, almost always), what verified admissions cost, when to go and — very important — how the bookings and caps work on beaches such as La Pelosa or Cala Goloritzé, which now limit visitor numbers to protect themselves. Sardinia demands planning, but it repays you with an unforgettable trip.
Sardinia's history begins with an enigma: the Nuragic civilisation, which between 1800 and 500 BC covered the island with thousands of nuraghi, dry-stone towers built without mortar — the most famous, Su Nuraxi at Barumini, is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Then came the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, who founded towns on the coast, and in 238 BC the Romans, who exploited its mines and its wheat but never fully mastered the mountainous interior, which they called 'Barbaria'. After Rome came the Vandals and the Byzantines, and in the Middle Ages the island organised itself in a singular way into four autonomous kingdoms, the judicates; the most famous of its rulers was Eleanor of Arborea, who at the end of the 14th century issued the Carta de Logu, a code of laws advanced for its time. Then the Crown of Aragon and Spain ruled the island for centuries — which is why Catalan is still spoken in Alghero — until in 1720 Sardinia passed to the House of Savoy, which created the Kingdom of Sardinia, the seed of a future unified Italy (1861). Marked by mining, malaria and emigration, Sardinia obtained a special statute of autonomy in 1948 and today proudly defends its Sardinian language and its identity. All that history, with its dates and protagonists, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The two great islands of the Mediterranean: Sicily, a crossroads of Greeks, Arabs and Normans, from the Vespers to Garibaldi and from the drama of the mafia to the courage of the anti-mafia movement; and Sardinia, land of the nuraghi, the judicates, Aragon and the House of Savoy.
Read the history of Islands (Sicily and Sardinia) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Sardinia's deep history begins with one of the great enigmas of ancient Europe: the Nuragic civilisation. Between roughly 1800 and 500 BC, during the Bronze and Iron Ages, the island's inhabitants raised more than seven thousand nuraghi, truncated-cone towers built from enormous stone blocks fitted without mortar, using the cyclopean walling technique. There is no other megalithic structure like it in such numbers anywhere in the Mediterranean. The astonishing thing is that this culture left no written texts: we do not know for certain what they called themselves, what language they spoke or how they understood the world. Everything we know comes from archaeology.
The evidence suggests the nuraghi served as dwellings, defences, storehouses, means of controlling territory and perhaps as religious buildings and status symbols for the elites. The most monumental and best preserved example is Su Nuraxi at Barumini, with a great central tower ringed by a bastion and an extensive village of huts: it is the only Nuragic property inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage list. Alongside the nuraghi, this civilisation left tombe dei giganti (monumental collective tombs), pozzi sacri (sacred wells dedicated to the cult of water) and thousands of bronze figurines (the bronzetti) representing warriors, chiefs, animals and scenes from daily life.
One exceptional discovery was the Giants of Mont'e Prama: a group of large limestone statues almost two metres tall — warriors, archers, boxers — carved some 2,800 years ago and found on the west coast, now displayed in museums in Cagliari and Cabras. They are the oldest monumental sculpture in the western Mediterranean, earlier than archaic Greek statuary, and they show that Nuragic society was more complex and sophisticated than had been thought. Studying this culture means looking into a still-open chapter of European prehistory.
From the 9th-8th centuries BC, the Phoenicians, great navigators and traders of the eastern Mediterranean, began setting up trading posts and towns on Sardinia's coasts: Nora, Sulci, Tharros, Bithia, Karalis (today's Cagliari). They were looking for safe harbours and access to the island's metals, rich in lead, silver and iron. Coexistence with the Nuragic people was commercial at first, but over time Phoenician power took hold along the coast.
In the 6th century BC, Carthage — the great Punic power of North Africa, heir to the Phoenicians — took control of the island, which became a key piece of its commercial and agricultural empire. The Carthaginians heavily exploited Sardinian resources and fought part of their struggle with the Greeks and, later, with Rome here. After the First Punic War, taking advantage of Carthage's weakness, Rome seized Sardinia and Corsica in 238 BC and turned them into a province.
Under Rome, the island was valued for its wheat and its mines, but the Romans never managed to fully subdue the mountainous interior, populated by indigenous peoples who resisted fiercely and whom the Romans themselves called 'Barbaria' — hence the present-day name of the Barbagia region. Sardinia was thus split between a Romanised coast, with towns, roads and amphitheatres (such as the one in Cagliari), and rebellious, semi-independent highlands. That duality between a coast open to the sea and a closed, mountainous interior would shape the island's history and character for ever. After the fall of Rome came the Vandals and then the Byzantines, who ruled for centuries and Christianised the island.
As Byzantine control weakened, between the 9th and 11th centuries Sardinia developed a singular political system, practically unique in medieval Europe: the giudicati, or judicates. The island was divided into four autonomous, independent kingdoms — Cagliari (Càlari), Arborea, Torres (or Logudoro) and Gallura — each ruled by a giudice (judge-king) with wide powers. It was a period of Sardinian self-government, with its own institutions, laws and language, though also of growing interference from the maritime republics of Pisa and Genoa, which competed to control trade and power on the island.
The most resilient and famous of these kingdoms was the Judicate of Arborea, in the centre-west, with its capital at Oristano. Its best-remembered figure is Eleanor of Arborea (around 1347-1404), the woman judge who governed at the end of the 14th century and led the long Sardinian resistance to the expansion of the Crown of Aragon. Eleanor is a national heroine of Sardinia, a symbol of the defence of the island's independence.
Her most enduring work was the Carta de Logu, a code of laws issued or revised around 1392, written in Sardinian, which brought together the judicate's civil and criminal law. It was a remarkably advanced text for its time — it regulated property, marriage, crime and even the protection of crops and nature — and it stayed in force across Sardinia for centuries, long after the judicate had disappeared, until the early 19th century. The Carta de Logu is one of the great legal monuments of medieval Europe and a source of pride in Sardinian identity.
In 1297, Pope Boniface VIII, in the context of his conflicts with Aragon, created the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae on paper and handed it to King James II of Aragon. The actual conquest, however, was neither quick nor easy: the Aragonese landed in 1323 and took more than a century to master the island, running again and again into the resistance of Eleanor's Judicate of Arborea and her successors. Only in 1420, after the battle of Sanluri and the purchase of the last remaining rights, did the Crown of Aragon complete its control of Sardinia.
One of the most significant episodes of that conquest was the taking of Alghero. In 1353, after overcoming local resistance, the Aragonese expelled the Sardinian and Ligurian population from the town and repopulated it with Catalan settlers. That transplant explains a phenomenon that lasts to this day: Catalan is still spoken in Alghero, in its local variety, alguerès, which is officially recognised. The town keeps the look, the language and many traditions of that colonisation, which makes it unique in all of Italy.
With the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, Sardinia became part of the Habsburg Spanish monarchy and was governed for almost two centuries by viceroys in the name of the king of Spain. It was an age of foreign rule, of a heavyweight landowning nobility and of an economy geared to exporting grain, salt and minerals, but also of decline, epidemics and Barbary pirate attacks that ravaged the coasts and forced the building of dozens of watchtowers, many still standing. The Spanish mark — on the language, religious life, architecture and food — is still deep on the island.
The 18th century brought a turnaround. After the War of the Spanish Succession, Sardinia changed hands several times until, in 1720, it ended up in the hands of the House of Savoy, the dynasty that reigned in Piedmont. Duke Victor Amadeus II took the title of king of Sardinia, and from then on the whole of the Savoyard territories — Piedmont, Savoy, Nice, Liguria and the island itself — became known as the Kingdom of Sardinia, with its capital, curiously, in Turin, on the mainland, and not on the island that gave it its name.
Under the Savoys, Sardinia remained the poorest and most peripheral part of the kingdom, and in the early 19th century it went through a traumatic episode: the chiudende, the enclosure and privatisation of the common lands that had sustained the life of Sardinian shepherds for centuries, causing conflict and impoverishment. Even so, the Kingdom of Sardinia took on a decisive historical role, because from Piedmont, and with figures such as Count Cavour and King Victor Emmanuel II, it became the engine of Italian unification (the Risorgimento).
In 1861, after the wars of independence and Garibaldi's expedition, Victor Emmanuel II, until then king of Sardinia, was proclaimed king of Italy: the old Sardinian-Piedmontese kingdom became the new Kingdom of Italy, and Sardinia was absorbed into the unified Italian state. The island, which had given its name to the dynasty and to the kingdom that united Italy, became just one more region of a much larger country, with a distant capital, first in Turin and Florence and then in Rome.
The Sardinia of the 19th and 20th centuries was marked by mining and by the harshness of life. The south-west of the island, the Sulcis-Iglesiente region, saw a mining boom in lead, zinc, silver and coal that drew thousands of workers and left behind villages, shafts and installations that today make up an impressive geomining park recognised by Unesco, testimony to an era of extreme labour and workers' struggles. At the same time, malaria ravaged the coastal and marshy areas, holding back development, until a major eradication campaign in the mid-20th century wiped it out. Poverty pushed people, as in Sicily, into heavy emigration.
Through the 20th century, Sardinia took part in Italy's great events: the First World War, in which the heroic Sassari Brigade distinguished itself; fascism, which founded new towns such as Carbonia for mining and drained land; and the Second World War, with bombing raids on Cagliari. In 1948, in republican Italy, Sardinia obtained a special statute of autonomy, which recognises powers of its own in view of its island status and its identity.
That identity has one central pillar: the Sardinian language (sardu), considered by linguists the most conservative Romance language, the closest to the Latin it comes from. Alongside Sardinian there are other minority varieties, such as the Catalan of Alghero, the Ligurian of Carloforte and the Corsican-Tuscan of the north. Defending Sardinian and its own culture is a live issue today. In recent decades tourism — drawn by spectacular beaches such as those of the Costa Smeralda, the Gulf of Orosei or La Pelosa — has become an economic engine, with the challenge of protecting a fragile natural heritage: hence the caps and bookings that now regulate access to the most famous coves. Sardinia faces the future proudly insisting that it is, above all, Sardinian.