Sardinia has something like seven thousand stone towers standing in its fields, built by people who left no writing at all, and almost nobody who comes here for the beaches goes to look at one. Two of the most accessible…
Supporting Guide
Alghero’s Catalan Heritage
Every street sign in the old town of Alghero is written twice. Italian on top. Underneath, in smaller letters, the same street in a different language: carrer instead of via, plaça instead of piazza. It is not decoration and it…
The Best Alghero Boat Tours: Sailing the Coral Coast
Alghero faces west into open sea, and there is nothing between this coast and the Balearic Islands. That single fact decides what boat trips here are like. This is not the cave-hopping of the Amalfi Coast or the island circuit…
Neptune’s Grotto and Capo Caccia: How to Visit
Twenty minutes west of Alghero the land simply stops. Capo Caccia is a headland of white limestone that drops something close to two hundred metres straight into the sea, and from the water it does not look like a cliff…
The Best Beaches in Alghero
The thing that makes Alghero unusual among Italian beach towns is that the good beaches are on a public bus for about a euro. That sounds like a small administrative detail. It is not. Most of the best coast in…
Getting to Alghero and Getting Around
Alghero is the easiest place to arrive in Sardinia, and one of the few where you can have a good week without hiring a car. That is unusual on this island. Most of Sardinia’s coast assumes you are driving. Alghero…
The Best Time to Visit Alghero
September, and it is not a close decision. The heat has broken but the sea is still around twenty three degrees. The Italian holidays end in the first week and the crowds thin within a fortnight. The town holds its…
Where to Eat in Alghero: What to Order
Alghero eats differently from the rest of Sardinia, and the reason is the same as everything else about this town. Six hundred years of Catalan settlement left a kitchen that is not quite Italian and not quite Spanish. The signature…
Where to Stay in Alghero: The Best Areas
There are really only two decisions to make in Alghero, and the second one is about a car. Stay inside the walls and you get the town: the lanes, the restaurants at your door, and the evening on the ramparts…
The Best Things to Do in Alghero
Alghero is small enough that you can see the whole of it in a day and interesting enough that you should not. The old town is about six hundred metres end to end. What fills a stay is not the…
The Best Day Trips from Cagliari
Cagliari sits at the bottom of an island most people only see the top of, and the day trips from it fall into three kinds: archaeology, beaches, and the inland Sardinia that almost no visitor bothers with. All three are…
Su Nuraxi di Barumini and the Nuraghic South
There are around seven thousand nuraghi on Sardinia, stone towers built between roughly 1800 and 1100 BC by a civilisation that left no writing, and nobody is certain what they were for. Su Nuraxi di Barumini, an hour inland from…
