10 Facts About Sardinia You Might Not Know
A few nuggets of knowledge for your next small talk on the beach – or just to get to know the island a bit better.
- 1. Second-largest island in the Mediterranean. Only Sicily is bigger – Sardinia covers about 24,000 km², noticeably larger than many expect.
- 2. Over 7,000 nuraghi. Nowhere else in the world is there a comparable density of Bronze Age stone towers (more in our nuraghi article).
- 3. Its own language, not a dialect. Sardinian is considered by linguists to be an independent, particularly conservative Romance language.
- 4. The Barbagia is a "Blue Zone." The mountainous region inland is one of the few places worldwide with an exceptional number of centenarians – the subject of numerous longevity studies (more in our (German-language) dedicated article on the Barbagia Blue Zone).
- 5. UNESCO heritage you can listen to. The polyphonic "Cantu a Tenore" from the Barbagia has been on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2005.
- 6. Sand that's actually quartz. On Is Arutas beach on the Sinis Peninsula, the "sand" is made of tiny, rice-grain-shaped quartz grains instead of ordinary sand.
- 7. A 65-kilometre-long procession. The Sant'Efisio procession in Cagliari dates back to a vow made in 1652 and is one of Italy's longest religious processions.
- 8. Its own little "kingdom." The island of Tavolara off San Teodoro was, according to legend, declared an independent kingdom in the 19th century – a story still fondly told today.
- 9. An autonomous region with special status. Since 1948, Sardinia has been one of five Italian regions with special autonomy and its own legislative powers.
- 10. Ancient, ungrafted grapevines. In the Sulcis in the southwest, some Carignano vines grow in sandy soil that phylloxera never managed to infest – some are among the oldest vineyards in Europe.
In the end, it's often the small, unexpected details that turn an island like Sardinia from a pure beach destination into a place with real history.