The Most Remarkable Nuraghi in the World
5 places · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable nuraghi in the world are Su Nuraxi di Barumini (Italy), Nuraghe Is Paras (Italy) and Nuraghe Santu Antine (Italy). The list covers 5 nuraghi. Last updated 5 October 2026.
Nuraghi are the Bronze Age stone towers of Sardinia, built by the Nuragic civilisation without mortar from large blocks of basalt, granite or limestone. Their profile is a truncated cone, and inside the chambers rise into corbelled vaults, each ring of stone stepping slightly inward until the dome closes. The larger ones grew into complexes: a central tower ringed by lesser towers and curtain walls, with a village of round huts clustered outside. Nothing quite like them stands anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
Su Nuraxi di Barumini, on the World Heritage list since 1997, is the best known — a central tower wrapped in a four-towered bastion and surrounded by the remains of a village. Nuraghe Santu Antine near Torralba keeps a tall central tower with passages running through the thickness of its walls. Nuraghe Losa near Abbasanta has a triangular bastion around its keep, Nuraghe Arrubiu at Orroli takes its name from the reddish lichen on its stone, and Nuraghe Is Paras at Isili is known for the height of its inner vaulted chamber.
These towers are chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with its author credited and a place on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Su Nuraxi di Barumini | Nuraghe | Italy | ✓ |
| 2 | Nuraghe Is Paras | Nuraghe | Italy | |
| 3 | Nuraghe Santu Antine | Nuraghe | Italy | |
| 4 | Nuraghe Arrubiu | Nuraghe | Italy | |
| 5 | Nuraghe Losa | Nuraghe | Italy |
01 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. Scholars regard it as the most impressive expression of that civilization, and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997. What makes it special is not a single tower but a whole fortified complex, with the remains of a village clustered around its base.
Did you know? Until 1949 the whole complex lay buried under earth and looked like just another low hill, until torrential rains washed soil away and exposed its stones.
02 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. The central tower holds a corbelled stone dome, a tholos, that rises 11.8 metres over a chamber about 12.5 metres across. It is the tallest tholos known in Nuragic Sardinia, and the archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu called it the largest and most harmonious of all the island's domes; among Bronze Age vaults of its kind in the Mediterranean, only the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae is usually ranked above it.
Did you know? When its dome was raised in the 15th–14th century BC it may have been the tallest in the world, outdone only later by the Treasury of Atreus.
03 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. Sardinians have long called it sa domo de su re, "the house of the king", and the name fits: of the thousands of nuraghi scattered across the island, few match it for scale or for the finesse of its engineering. The historian of astronomy Michael Hoskin went further and described it as the most sophisticated dry-stone monument on the face of the earth.
Did you know? The name Santu Antine is the Sardinian form of Saint Constantine, the Roman emperor who legalised Christianity in the 4th century.
04 Nuraghe Arrubiu
Italy39.662° N 9.298° E
Hpschaefer · CC BY-SA 3.0 Nuraghe Arrubiu is the Bronze Age at its most ambitious. Built around 1500 BC on the basalt plateau of Pranemuru above the valley of the Flumendosa, it is the only known nuraghe with a five-lobed plan: a central keep ringed by a bastion of five towers, which is in turn wrapped by an outer wall with seven more towers enclosing three courtyards. Counting the further circuits of walling around it, the complex had some twenty-one towers in all. The keep once rose an estimated 25 to 30 metres, among the tallest structures anywhere in Bronze Age Europe; about 14 metres survive, still enough to dominate the plateau.
Did you know? Arrubiu is described as the largest and most complex nuraghe in Sardinia, its whole complex covering more than 5,000 square metres.
05 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. The central tower was raised in the Middle Bronze Age, broadly between the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC; over the following centuries it was wrapped in a bastion of three smaller towers, so that from above the whole thing reads as a near-perfect equilateral triangle with rounded corners.
Did you know? The whole complex, village included, is ringed by a roughly elliptical outer wall measuring about 172 by 268 metres.
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 is a nuraghe?
- A nuraghe is a dry-stone tower built in Sardinia during the Bronze Age by the Nuragic civilisation. Typical features are a truncated-cone shape and interior chambers roofed with corbelled vaults.
- How many nuraghi are there in Sardinia?
- Thousands of nuraghi survive across the island, and estimates commonly run to around seven thousand, from single towers to large multi-towered complexes.
- What is the most famous nuraghe?
- On our list, Su Nuraxi di Barumini (Italy) ranks first, followed by Nuraghe Is Paras (Italy) and Nuraghe Santu Antine (Italy).
- Which country has nuraghi?
- Nuraghi are found only in Sardinia, so all the sites in our collection are in Italy.
- How many nuraghi are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 nuraghi.