Loop from Olbia

01 Village

San Pantaleo

Climb up to this hamlet of Olbia perched in the Cugnana massif, above the Costa Smeralda. Born in the early 19th century around a stazzo, an isolated farm, it is home to craftsmen working in wood, iron and ceramics. In 1977, James Bond sped through here in a Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me.

02 Beach  · Family

Capriccioli

Spread your towel on one of the two white-sand beaches separated by a spur of granite rocks, just south of Cala di Volpe. Opposite, the islands of Mortorio, Soffi and the Camere belong to the La Maddalena archipelago park. Behind, junipers, rockroses and wild olives make up a fragrant maquis.

03 Village

Porto Cervo

Porto Cervo was born in 1962, when Aga Khan IV bought this coast and entrusted a theatre designer, Jacques Couelle, with inventing a village. Stroll from the piazzetta paved in red brick to Michele Busiri Vici's Stella Maris church. This setting blends Gallura with the Cyclades, Andalusia and the Maghreb, around a deep natural harbour.

04 Archaeology

Giants' grave of Coddu Vecchiu

Tomba dei giganti di Coddu Vecchiu

Near Arzachena, eleven upright granite slabs set in a semicircle open one of the largest giants' tombs in Sardinia, built around 1800-1600 BC. In the centre, the top of the stele of about 4 metres, pierced by the entrance, was used as a plough by a farmer before being put back in place. You can continue to the nearby nuraghe La Prisgiona.

05 Viewpoint

Capo d'Orso

06 Village

Santa Teresa Gallura

Climb to the Longosardo tower, on the town's rocky point, to look out at Corsica beyond the Strait of Bonifacio. Victor Emmanuel I founded the town in 1808, drew up its plan himself and named it after Queen Maria Theresa. The nearby quarries of Capo Testa supplied the granite for Pisa cathedral.

07 Coast

Capo Testa

Follow the red-and-white waymarked paths through the granite of Capo Testa, facing the Strait of Bonifacio. On the cliffs, Roman quarrymen left stepped cuts and huge squared blocks, and in 1162 columns for Pisa's Duomo were still being quarried here. In the distance, Corsica closes the horizon.

08 Island

Isola Rossa

Some 500 metres offshore, the reddish islet that gave this fishing hamlet its name rises from the Sea of Gallura. On the promontory, a Spanish tower built around 1595 kept watch for Saracens and then for smugglers from Corsica. Follow the cliff path to the red porphyry rocks that enclose the beach of La Marinedda.

09 Archaeology

Elephant Rock

Domus de janas della Roccia dell'Elefante

By the roadside near Castelsardo, a volcanic boulder shaped by erosion has taken on the look of an elephant, a name it has borne since 1914. Two superimposed prehistoric tombs are hollowed into its sides, and one shows two bulls' heads in relief, dating from before the middle of the third millennium BC. Take it in from the verge.

10 Village

Castelsardo

The village huddles on a trachyte promontory around the castle built by the Genoese Doria family in the 13th century. It was called Castelgenovese, then Castelaragonese, before becoming Castelsardo in 1767. Climb to the top of the old town: on a clear day, the view sweeps across the whole gulf to the Corsican coast.

11 Beach  · Family

Spiaggia della Pelosa

12 Coast

Capo Caccia

You can see Capo Caccia barring the horizon from Alghero, a limestone cliff plunging into the sea in north-west Sardinia. At its foot opens Neptune's Grotto; at the top, a lighthouse perched at 186 metres casts its light some 34 miles. Peregrine falcons and Bonelli's eagles circle along the rock faces, above the islet of Foradada.

13 Museum

Nuraghe Palmavera

Complesso nuragico di Palmavera

At the foot of Monte Palmavera, a limestone nuragic tower, later wrapped in sandstone blocks, watches over some fifty round huts. The largest, the meeting hut, keeps thirty-six sandstone seats lined against its circular wall, near a throne seat. Then turn towards the sea, which the tower kept watch over along the whole coast.

14 Castle

Torri e bastioni di Alghero

In Alghero, walk along the sea bastions, spared when the landward walls were torn down and merely lowered to open up the view of the sea. Among the towers still standing, that of Porta Terra owes much to the city's Jewish community. In the Sulis tower, with walls 6 metres thick, the conspirator Vincenzo Sulis was imprisoned from 1799 to 1821.

15 Village

Bosa

The colourful houses of Sa Costa climb in tight rows towards the Malaspina castle, above the slow waters of the Temo. Walk along the opposite bank, lined with the old tanneries, to take in the tiered town at a glance. Malvasia, a sweet white wine, was the first in Sardinia to receive a protected designation here.

16 Archaeology

Area archeologica di Santa Cristina

Devoted to the cult of water around the 11th century BC, the sacred well of Santa Cristina has one of the best-preserved interiors in Sardinia. A staircase of 25 steps descends, narrowing, to a chamber topped by a basalt corbelled dome. Watch the groundwater lap at the first step.

17 Museum

Tharros

Walk on the basalt paving of the Roman streets of Tharros, at the south of the Sinis peninsula. Founded by the Phoenicians in the 8th century BC, it keeps its tophet and the base of a Punic temple. Abandoned around 1050, it left, as a Sardinian saying goes, by the cartload for Oristano.

18 Museum

Su Nuraxi

Area archeologica di Su Nuraxi

Approach the basalt mass of Su Nuraxi, whose central tower stood alone in the Bronze Age before four towers facing the cardinal points were added to buttress it. Around it, the round huts of the village cluster on a ledge beneath the giara of Tuili. Giovanni Lilliu excavated it from 1951 to 1956, and UNESCO listed it in 1997.

19 Heritage

Bastione San Remy

Climb the twin staircases of the Bastione San Remy to the neoclassical triumphal arch that opens onto the Umberto I terrace, above Cagliari. Built between 1899 and 1903 in stone from the Bonaria quarries, it bears the name of the first Savoyard viceroy of Sardinia. The bombs of February 1943 destroyed its arch, rebuilt after the war.

20 Beach  · Family

Tuerredda

21 Monument

Torre di Chia

Climb the headland between the beaches of Su Portu and Sa Colonia to this round limestone tower. Completed in 1592 to deny the Barbary pirates the fresh water of the Riu di Chia, it reuses stones from Bithia, the Phoenician city whose acropolis was this hill. From the top, the coast stretches as far as the eye can see.

22 Museum

Nora, Italy

Area archeologica di Nora

On the Capo Pula promontory, the sea laps the ruins of a town founded by the Phoenicians, which became Punic and then Roman. Theatre, baths, forum and houses date mostly from the Roman boom of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Listen to the surf on this shore where, in 1889, a storm surge uncovered the Punic tophet.

23 Beach  · Family

Poetto

Between the Sella del Diavolo and Margine Rosso, the Poetto unrolls some eight kilometres of sand facing the Gulf of Angels, backed by the Molentargius salt pans. Stroll along this beach of the Hundred Thousand, watching for the pink flamingos of the salt pans. Until 1986, its casotti, colourful wooden huts, lined the shore.

24 Monument

Torre di Porto Giunco

This granite tower built by the Spanish to watch for Barbary pirates overlooks the beach of Porto Giunco and the Notteri lagoon. In 1812 Tunisian ships besieged it without managing to bring it down. Reach it by a path through the scrub from the small cove.

25 Beach  · Family

Costa Rei

26 Monument

Torre di Arbatax

27 Mountain

Pedra Longa

Watch this 128-metre limestone spur plunge sheer into the sea on the Baunei coast. Almost bare, the rock nonetheless hides wild olive and carob trees in its gullies. Detached from Monte Santu, which towers above it, this pale block of rock has been a protected natural monument since 1993.

28 Nature park

Monumento naturale Su Sterru

On the Golgo plateau, near the church of San Pietro, the ground opens onto a shaft nearly 295 metres deep. Keeping well back from the edge, look at the band of black basalt crowning the white limestone. Long taken for a crater, the chasm revealed its bottom only in 1957, to the cavers of the Gruppo Grotte Nuorese.

29 Village

Cala Gonone

As you leave the tunnel, Cala Gonone appears far below, set against the blue of the Gulf of Orosei. Born around a church of 1878, the village grew in the early 20th century with a colony of fishermen from Ponza. The only village and only port south of Orosei, it faces a coast that no road follows.

30 Beach  · Family

Cala Fuili

At the end of the road from Cala Gonone, Cala Fuili lies at the mouth of its codula, between rock walls popular with climbers. Go down the steps cut into the rock through the maquis to the mix of white sand and pebbles. The shallow water shifts from green to turquoise.

31 Lake

Su Gologone

In the Supramonte of Oliena, the water of a vast karst network gushes from a crack in the limestone, which cavers have explored to a depth of 135 metres. Its average flow, five hundred litres per second, makes it the largest spring in Sardinia. Lean over the edge and follow with your eyes the fissure that sinks into the rock.

32 Village

Orgosolo

Orgosolo, at 620 metres in the heart of the Barbagia, is known for the political murals covering the façades of its houses. Its vast territory holds some thirty nuraghi, including the Mereu nuraghe, deep in the Supramonte. Stroll slowly up the main street, reading the walls like the pages of a chronicle.

33 Village

Nuoro

Look out above the rooftops for Monte Ortobene, 955 metres high, at whose foot the town sits on a granite plateau. Grazia Deledda, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, was born here. In the Su Nuraghe district, an urban park preserves the Tanca Manna nuraghe and its Bronze Age village.

34 Village

Posada, Sardinia

Posada

Look up at the Castello della Fava, which crowns the hill of Posada, former capital of the Baronia on the east coast of Sardinia. A papal bull of 1095 already mentions an estate here belonging to the Benedictine monks of Saint-Victor in Marseille. Below, the Posada river ends its course towards the sea.

35 Village

San Teodoro, Sardinia

San Teodoro

San Teodoro spreads out at the eastern foot of the Monte Nieddu massif, between Gallura and Baronia, a stone's throw from its coastal lagoon. At the Museo del Mare you can see the Roman and Byzantine objects found nearby, clues to a past long left in the shadows. By the sea, the long beach of La Cinta separates the lagoon from the turquoise waters.

36 Church

Basilica of San Simplicio, Olbia

Basilica di San Simplicio

Built of granite on a mound once devoted to burials, outside the walls, San Simplicio was Olbia's cathedral until 1839. Its façade opens with a trifora whose black lava capitals show birds of prey. On the left, look for the reused marble slab where a horseman brandishes a weapon at an armed angel.