The Most Beautiful Places in Sardinia
15 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Sardinia are Cala Goloritzé, Su Nuraxi di Barumini and Neptune's Grotto. The list covers 15 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Sardinia is one of the oldest landmasses in the Mediterranean, a block of granite, schist and limestone that sits apart from the Italian mainland and has kept a culture of its own. Its signature is the nuraghe, a Bronze Age stone tower built without mortar; thousands still stand across the island. Along the east coast, limestone cliffs fall straight into clear water.
Su Nuraxi di Barumini, excavated in the 1950s, is a fortress of towers surrounded by a village of round huts and is listed by UNESCO. Nuraghe Santu Antine near Torralba rises in layered basalt around a central tower, Nuraghe Losa has a three-lobed bastion, and Nuraghe Arrubiu takes its name from the red lichen that colours its stones. Nuraghe Is Paras at Isili is known for the height of its corbelled inner vault, and at Santa Cristina a stone stairway descends into a sacred well built with remarkable precision.
In the Supramonte, the hidden village of Tiscali sits inside a collapsed limestone sinkhole, and the Gorropu Gorge cuts walls hundreds of metres high. On the Gulf of Orosei, Cala Goloritzé is marked by a slender limestone pinnacle and Cala Mariolu by its white pebbles. At the island's north-western tip, the Torre della Pelosa watches over a shallow, pale lagoon.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cala Goloritzé | Beach | |
| 2 | Su Nuraxi di Barumini | Nuraghe | ✓ |
| 3 | Neptune's Grotto | Show cave | |
| 4 | Gorropu Gorge | Canyon | |
| 5 | Porto Flavia | Abandoned mine | |
| 6 | Torre della Pelosa | Watchtower | |
| 7 | Santa Cristina nuragic site | Archaeological site | |
| 8 | Nuraghe Is Paras | Nuraghe | |
| 9 | Nuraghe Santu Antine | Nuraghe | |
| 10 | Nuraghe Arrubiu | Nuraghe | |
| 11 | Nuraghe Losa | Nuraghe | |
| 12 | Cala Mariolu | Beach | |
| 13 | Tiscali | Archaeological site | |
| 14 | The Pink Beach | Beach | |
| 15 | grotta di Ispinigoli | Show cave |
01 Cala Goloritzé
Italy40.108° N 9.690° E
Image by Giglio_di_mare from Pixabay Cala Goloritzé is a small cove at the southern end of the Gulf of Orosei, on the wild eastern coast of Sardinia in the municipality of Baunei. It is younger than it looks: the pale fan of pebbles on which people now lie was brought down by a landslide in 1962.
Did you know? The name may come from a Sardinian word for snake, an allusion to the winding shape of the Goloritzé gorge.
02 Su Nuraxi di Barumini
Area archeologica di Su Nuraxi
Italy39.703° N 9.000° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Norbert Nagel · CC BY-SA 3.0 Sardinia is dotted with nuraghi, the stone towers of the Bronze Age Nuragic civilization, and Su Nuraxi at Barumini is the most complete of them. The name simply means "the nuraghe" in Campidanese Sardinian.
Did you know? The three stacked rooms of the central tower were linked by a spiral staircase; the topmost chamber has collapsed, but the two below are almost intact.
03 Neptune's Grotto
Grotte di Nettuno
Italy · 39.2 km from Sassari40.565° N 8.160° E
Holger Uwe Schmitt · CC BY-SA 4.0 Neptune's Grotto opens at the foot of Capo Caccia, a sheer headland on the coast near Alghero. Its mouth sits barely a metre above the Mediterranean under cliffs about 110 metres high, and that position decides everything about a visit: the cave can only be entered when the sea is calm.
Did you know? When King Charles Albert returned in 1841, he brought his eldest son, the future Victor Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy.
04 Gorropu Gorge
Gola di Gorropu
Italy40.185° N 9.502° E
Giorgio Galeotti · CC BY 4.0 Walls of grey limestone rise more than 500 metres on either side of the Rio Flumineddu at Gorropu, and at the tightest point the floor of the gorge narrows to roughly four metres.
Did you know? Some of the yews and phillyrea shrubs rooted in the gorge are believed to be around a thousand years old.
05 Porto Flavia
Italy39.336° N 8.408° E
noname · CC BY 3.0 Halfway up a sheer cliff on Sardinia's west coast, a portal with a small concrete tower looks straight out over the sea at the sea stack of Pan di Zucchero.
Did you know? The nine ore silos were dug upwards from the lower gallery, so the broken basalt fell out of the way; each is between 4 and 8 metres across.
06 Torre della Pelosa
Italy40.971° N 8.207° E
Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Torre della Pelosa sits on a rocky islet just off one of the most famous beaches in the Mediterranean, at the northwestern tip of Sardinia.
Did you know? Besides its three heavy cannon, the garrison had a spingarda, a light swivel gun, and several muskets.
07 Santa Cristina nuragic site
Area archeologica di Santa Cristina
Italy40.061° N 8.731° E
Aga Khan (IT) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The sacred well of Santa Cristina is the most refined building of Sardinia's Nuragic civilisation. 4 metres at the bottom, into a circular chamber where spring water still rises.
Did you know? Systematic excavations were led by the archaeologist Enrico Atzeni in 1967–1973 and again in 1977–1983, after first digs and restoration in 1953.
08 Nuraghe Is Paras
Italy39.749° N 9.107° E
Cristiano Cani · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Is Paras stands on the edge of Isili, in the Sarcidano uplands of central Sardinia, and from the outside it gives little away: a pale, compact mass of limestone on a rise looking west over open country. Its fame lies inside. 5 metres across.
Did you know? Between the 13th and 12th centuries BC a smaller tower was added, the entrance was shifted to the east and a courtyard formed between the towers.
09 Nuraghe Santu Antine
Italy · 31.9 km from Sassari40.487° N 8.770° E
This illustration was made by ( User:Royonx ) and released under the license(s) stated above. You are free to use it for any purpose as long as you credit me and follow the terms of the license. Example : © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons If you use this image outside of the Wikimedia projects, I would be happy to hear from you par courriel ( royonx gmail.com). Thanks ! Ce message en français · CC BY-SA 3.0 Santu Antine rises out of the Cabu Abbas plain in the Meilogu district of northern Sardinia, a dark mass of basalt blocks laid without mortar some three and a half thousand years ago.
Did you know? A spiral staircase in the thickness of the wall once climbed to three floors and a terrace; the uppermost level has since disappeared.
10 Nuraghe Arrubiu
Italy39.662° N 9.298° E
Hpschaefer · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Arrubiu is the Bronze Age at its most ambitious.
Did you know? The fortress fell into ruin around the 9th century BC, for reasons that remain unclear.
11 Nuraghe Losa
Italy40.116° N 8.793° E
Hans Hillewaert · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Losa rises out of the flat basalt plateau near Abbasanta, in west-central Sardinia, as a compact mass of dark, rough-hewn blocks. It belongs to the nuraghi — the Bronze Age stone towers that are the signature of the island's prehistory — and is one of the most complete and legible of them.
Did you know? The first excavations were made in the 1880s by the French engineer Léon Gouin, before Filippo Vivanet took over in 1890.
12 Cala Mariolu
Italy40.123° N 9.676° E
Lddcrs · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cala Mariolu is a small cove on the wild eastern coast of Sardinia, in the stretch of the Gulf of Orosei that belongs to the municipality of Baunei. No road reaches it.
Did you know? Baunei villagers traditionally did not name individual beaches, so the cove was known only by the name of the wider locality around it.
13 Tiscali
Italy40.242° N 9.492° E
The original uploader was Myworld at Italian Wikipedia . · CC BY-SA 2.0 Tiscali is a prehistoric village hidden inside a mountain. On the summit of Monte Tiscali, a 518-metre limestone peak in the Supramonte highlands of eastern Sardinia, the rock is hollowed by a vast karst sinkhole, a deep depression open to the sky and partly overhung by its own walls.
Did you know? The ruins cover roughly 5,000 square metres, about nine tenths within Dorgali and the rest in Oliena.
14 The Pink Beach
Spiaggia rosa
Italy41.279° N 9.356° E
Luca Bittau · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Spiaggia Rosa owes its fame to a colour that seems improbable on a Mediterranean shore: a soft pink tint in the sand of Cala di Roto, a small bay on the south-eastern side of Budelli, one of the islands of the La Maddalena archipelago off the northern tip of Sardinia.
Did you know? In 2013, after the bankruptcy of its previous owner, the island was due to be sold for about 2.94 million euros to New Zealand businessman Michael Harte.
15 grotta di Ispinigoli
Grotta di Ispinigoli
Italy40.320° N 9.600° E
SehLax · CC BY 2.5 Most caves are entered from the side; Ispinigoli is entered from above. A long staircase drops into a single colossal chamber hollowed out of the limestone hills near Dorgali, in eastern Sardinia, and at its centre stands a column of stone about 38 metres tall, joining floor and vault.
Did you know? Legend says maidens were sacrificed in the Abyss of the Virgins; the bones found there are thought to be Nuragic burials.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Sardinia?
- On our list, Cala Goloritzé ranks first, followed by Su Nuraxi di Barumini and Neptune's Grotto.
- What is a nuraghe?
- A nuraghe is a stone tower built by the Nuragic civilisation of Sardinia during the Bronze Age, using large dry-laid blocks and a corbelled inner vault. Some stand alone, while others form complexes with bastions and surrounding villages.
- How old are the nuraghi of Sardinia?
- Most nuraghi were built during the Bronze Age, roughly between the eighteenth and the tenth centuries BC. Their exact purpose, whether fortress, residence or meeting place, is still discussed by archaeologists.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Sardinia?
- In our collection, the places in Sardinia are most often nuraghi (5), beaches (3), caves (2) and show caves (2).
- How many places are on this list in Sardinia?
- The list covers 15 places.