Nuraghi dot the Sardinian landscape. You can often get out of a car and visit one. But what are they and how are they built?
The name “nuraghe” (plural: nuraghi) derives from the word “nur” which means “hollow heap.” The first form of nuraghi was the nuraghi corridor, and from the outside it looked like a pile of rock, but the inside had been removed to form a habitation area.
What is a Nuraghe?
A nuraghe is a monumental tower made of huge roughly worked stones. A nuraghe could be in a single tower like the one in the photo, or several nuraghi could be linked together as a complex with connected structures and walls. Either way can show the remains of a nearby village.
Many Nuraghi towers are multi-story. In this case, there is usually a staircase that runs around the interior, and each floor is covered with a labeled cupola (a rounded cupola made by stacking rocks in circular courses, each course getting smaller as you go inward, until all meets at the top).
A nuraghe can have many niches in its walls, and there are secret rooms in some, usually near the entrance, giving rise to the idea that they were being used for passive defense. But there is hardly anything written to let us know exactly what they were used for, except for a single paragraph from the Romans that refers to how difficult it was to win a battle with people who had managed to enter a nuraghe and were ready to defend it. .
Visiting a Nuraghe
Unexcavated Nuraghe are often buried quite deep, no matter how high they appear (see images below), and you may not want to crawl and see inside. A better option is to go to one of the excavated examples where you can see complex tower complexes with remains of the village. A good example of one of these is found in Su Nuraxi di Barumini, whose central tower was built around 3,500 years ago.
- Su Nuraxi di Barumini is accessible by car, 60 km north of the city of Cagliari, southern Sardinia. There have been Nuragic, Punic and Roman artifacts found.
- Santu Antine , just outside the city of Torrialba, in the province of Sassari, near the road to the train station, is a complex formed around a central tower surrounded by three other smaller towers.
