Costa Verde

Costa Verde and its inside territory are geographically in the opposite to Costa Smeralda: west south against north east of the isle. But distance and contrast are not only visible on the card. The costly earth of VIP is indeed the antithesis of this angle of the Sardinian coast, which for historical and economic reasons outside the tourist bang which enriched but also damadged other parts of the isle. Until the fifties the main resource of this Sardinian Far West was in fact the mining activity. Alone few roads, not tarmacked joined the sea and the mines of Masua and Buggerru. It came to mind of nobody to be going to spend its vacation in the middle of miners' houses. When extractive activity was in crisis this part of coast with his citizens, became poor of everything, but rich in a potentially bottomless resources: the undamaged sea, undamaged Mediterranean nature, kilometres of uninhabited beaches. Even if it opens itself to tourism, Costa Verde, did not lose its characteristics of remoteness, few crowd and absence of worldliness. You will not find dance halls, villages of vacation, and umbrellas, but natural beauties in the middle of rusty wagons and mining establishment left, there’s an atmosphere which reminds the ghost villages of westerns.

Just two hotels, so many campings, some agritourisme: structures of welcome of Costa Verde do not go beyond. It is for it that it became the favourite destination of backpackers, campers and trekkers and fans of climbing.

They call it Costa Verde because the bushes of strawberry go down up to the sea giving a protection in a colony of harts which increases and which find food and calmness under the protection of valleys and dunes of sand. They could also call it the Coast of Silence, like these villages, which the most part are left, and which during dozens years represented mining, begun 5000 years ago with Phéniciens, continued by the Romans up to the Spanish and in our days. Silence: the one of luxury hotels constructed by English, German and French businessmen in 1800s and at the beginning of 1900s, the one of galleries where worked hard thousands of miners including women and children, the one of establishments which constitute one of the more delightful examples of mining archaeology.

Especially the silence of beaches, long bands of sands which stretch over kilometres, interrupted by absolute rocks. They are looked for frequently by tourists who look especially for calmness because these territories were not attacked yet by the wild urbanization which changed the face of numerous littorals in Sardinia. Costa Verde gives one of the nicest landscapes of the Mediterranean basin. It is impossible to meet such concentrated solution of feelings elsewhere given by pieces of mining archaeology and by a superb nature which become confused in a mysterious and melancholic atmosphere. Costa Verde presents itself on the western south coast of the isle, in the territory of Arbus, village which shares with Guspini some of the most interesting mining aeries of Europe: From these wells and Monteponi and Buggerru came 10 % of the worldwide production of lead and zinc. Montevecchio, Ingurtosu, Funtanazza, Piscinas, Naracauli, Scivu, Pistis are stages of a course which fascinates thousands of visitors who every year arrive from various country of Europe in search of feelings which are consequently difficult to find elsewhere. Here the show of nature gives feelings difficult to forget. It is the case of Scivu, a long solitary beach, without home nor hotel, and that saved itself thanks to the presence of prisons. It seems to be an African desert, tht’s the reason why they called it " Sahara of Italy ". You see dunes which face up the green and transparent sea, not far from the mining aeries of Ingurtosu and Naracauli, between the abandoned galleries and wagons for the mining transport made rusty by marine salt. The Mistral, wind prevailing in this party of coast, draws the landscape, folds trees and models the mountains of sand, by pushing them inwards, constructing and modifying white expanses which often receive superb copies of junipers, a sweet-scented and resistant plant. The attraction of this still undamaged nature mingles in a original manner with mining civilization with its constructions, its dispensaries, its wells, its galleries today left after the depletion of lead and zinc. Between Arbus and Guspini, it is possible to admire the most evocative examples of mining age. It is difficult to represent feelings that gives Ingurtosu, the big village was closed at the end of the sixties.

Yesterday lived between these hills of pines almost 5000 thousand persons, today no more than 100. Ingurtosu is a monument of mining archaeology among the most renowned of the world. There are the villas of granita in style as liberty, miners' houses, hospital, old elevators to go down in wells, the church and the school are submerged in a landscape of dream, which dominates as a colossal natural terrace the sea of Costa Verde and particularly the dunes of Piscinas.

You will find old constructions hidden in the green, visited more by the nanny goats than by the man.