As part of the rationale for
our trip out into the wilderness of the west coast was to see the deserted
silver mine at Argentiera, we decided to leave our soon-to-be rally site and
head off down the road to nowhere to see if the mine really existed. Before
long we rounded a bend and could see that it did indeed exist, and that the
small town was a mix of renovated houses and bars as well as the deserted mine
itself.
We parked up at what was
literally the end of the road, and started to wander about, soaking up the
atmosphere of dereliction but not abandonment, as some people were clearly
intent on making a go of the touristic potential. We’d read that a museum was
promised at some point in the future, but all we could see were the old
workings with what looked like glassed-in/blocked off parts, we assumed, for safety
reasons.
And then we spotted four
people going into one of the apparently abandoned and blocked off buildings,
so, not wanting to miss out on the chance of a peek inside, we started chatting
to them (after a fashion and in Mr B’s limited Italian). It turned out that
they were local officials from the municipality at Sàssari and they invited us
in for our own private tour! They were inspecting the buildings for damage and
security, as there were still plans for a museum but at the moment, it only
gets opened for a brief display in May – which we’d missed.
Dispelling the myth that
silver had been mined until 1963 when the workings closed (we’d thought it was
a silver mine based on our Rough Guide) we discovered that it had originally
been a silver mine in Roman times, but more recently it was used for extracting
lead and zinc, with most of what we were being shown around the ‘crunching and cleaning’
area before the minerals were shipped off for processing from the very small
harbour in the bay.
Thanking our hosts for
letting us have a look inside as they wound up their inspection visit, we
reflected on the likelihood of that happening back in the UK, or not! As we
wandered around the rest of the village we could see signs of investment in
some of the infrastructure to support more tourism (car parks, walkways,
repaired seawall etc) but it looked very much like the money had run out and an
air of neglect was already creeping over the village again.
Marvelling at our good luck
(and that it was still early enough in the day for us to plan some more
exploration en route to our as yet unplanned stopping point further down the
coast), we set off to visit the church of Santíssima Trinità di Saccargia,
famous for its zebra-striped construction using basalt and limestone. The roads
on Sardinia are of a very good standard and it didn’t take too long before we
could see the church looming in the distance. Unfortunately, the weather had
closed in and what had looked like a dazzling image of contrasting colours in
the pictures we’d seen, was transposed into an almost monochrome portrait as
the clouds added a sombre backdrop.
The church, built in 1116 by
a local noble, allegedly after a celestial visitation en route to a nearby city
(and hence its location in the middle of nowhere), is famous not only for its
use of the construction materials, but also for the fresco from the 11th
or 12th century.
Taking advantage of the low
visitor count on our visit, we made use of the Sard people’s willingness to
chat in Spanish if they don’t speak English and managed to get an explanation
from the person in the gift shop as to why we had seen many Sardninian flags
with heads facing left, as well as facing right. Similar to the Corsican flag
of the Moorish head with a bandana, we’d assumed that it was perhaps just a bit
of slack quality control.
We were soon put right
though and learnt that the official one has the bandana and face pointing
right, whilst the one associated with Sardinian independence is a blindfolded
head facing left. Embarrassingly, we’d not spotted the swapping of a bandana
for a blindfold!
As Mr B was keen on another
free camp, this time on the Capo Caccia peninsula, we realised we could also
fit in a visit to the famous Nuraghi complex at Santu Antine, near Torralba. It’s
one of the three Nuraghic sites that our guide had identified as ‘the best’
(not sure what happened at the editing stage!) As we pulled up into the
roadside car park opposite a very impressive tower like structure, there were
few other people about, so we decided to have a quick cuppa first. Big mistake,
as before we’d even had time to read the tealeaves, three coaches had pulled up
and disgorged loads of people…
Sardinia is dotted/littered with
Nuraghic sites, some just hummocks of grassed over boulders, some just piles of
boulders, but some, like Santu Antine, very easy to sense the majestic scale of
the original as its main tower, which, although reduced in height, still
dominates the landscape.
Influencing the much smaller
in scale menhir culture of Corsica, the Nuraghi were the dominant culture on
Sardinia between 1900 and 900 BCE, surviving into the 3rd century
AD, as their customs and buildings were absorbed into the Phoenician,
Carthaginian and eventually Roman empires. Our time in the Santu Antine site
was very atmospheric, as the coach parties were in and out in no time and we
had a chance to savour the passing centuries by waiting for each batch of coach
travellers to return to their vehicles.
The drive back to the coast
and Capo Caccia was very picturesque, with the landscape changing in that
Sardinian style we were getting accustomed to. It was also very twisty, turny
and slow, and so by the time we reached the beginning of the peninsula, it
might have been a bit later than anticipated. Having seen pictures of free
camping sites from a blogger who had over-wintered on the island and waxed
lyrical about Capo Caccia, we were confident of a quick and easy result…
It was only after Mrs B had
extracted the van from yet another lane too narrow to go down, and one or two
words might have been exchanged about the likelihood of finding anywhere before
darkness fell, that looking for a site in what is essentially a national park
(with attendant prohibitions on camping) was abandoned in favour of a nearby
campsite en route to our next stop in Alghero.
And so it was that we cruised
into another of Mussolini’s purpose-built ‘improvement’ towns, Fertilia,
looking for the Laguna Blu campsite ‘idyllically located between a lagoon and
the sea…’
Our view of an idyll was
clearly different however, and after a night shared with the gentle hum of
mosquitoes and traffic on the nearby road, and with clouds gathering and rain
falling, (and without our customary ‘pitch picture’ to remind us where we’d been)
we called it a day, and, after a quick visit to look at Il Duce’s nearby handiwork
(obviously best viewed with a lowering sky), we drove on the next morning to a
site right on the outskirts of Alghero, Mariposa, promising to each other not
to try to pack too much into one day in the future…
S&J
No comments:
Post a Comment