Nuraghe Arrubiu

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.

The name means "the red nuraghe" in Sardinian. The warm colour of its dark basalt blocks comes from lichens that crust the walls, glowing orange and rust in low sun; some also point to iron in the stone. Visitors who come in the late afternoon see the building at its most striking, with the long shadows picking out the rounded towers and the dry-stone courses fitted without mortar. Inside the keep the lower chamber is intact: a corbelled tholos about four metres across, its walls pierced by three niches arranged in a cross. Walking the narrow passages between bastion and keep gives a sense of how carefully the builders controlled movement through the fortress, and a drainage system fed rainwater into a cistern.

Life in the nuraghe ended abruptly at the start of the Iron Age, but the ruins were not abandoned for good. Among the finds is a Mycenaean alabastron, a small perfume vessel that shows how far Sardinian communities were connected across the Mediterranean. From the second century BC until the fifth century AD the Romans used the site as a farm, and two wine-making workshops with stone vats for pressing grapes were set up among the old walls.

Systematic excavation and consolidation began in 1981 under the archaeologists Fulvia Lo Schiavo and Mario Sanges and has continued since, with new campaigns resuming in 2012. The site belongs to the municipality of Orroli, a village of the Sarcidano region in the south-central interior of Sardinia, and the plateau around it, open, stony and scattered with scrub, gives the nuraghe a sense of isolation that suits it.

Getting there

The nuraghe stands on the Pranemuru plateau about 3.5 km from Orroli, reached by a signposted road off the SP 10. Cagliari Elmas Airport (CAG) is about 50 km away in a straight line; by road from Cagliari take the SS 131 towards Sassari and, after Monastir, the SS 128 towards Senorbì and on to Orroli, a drive of a little over an hour. ARST regional buses connect Cagliari with Orroli, but a car is the practical way to reach the site itself.