Nuraghe Losa

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.

The pleasure of Losa is in its masonry. The blocks are huge and only roughly dressed, yet they are laid in courses that taper upward with real control, and the inner rooms are roofed with corbelled false domes — each ring of stone stepping slightly inward until the vault closes. The keep still stands around 13 metres high, though it was taller once. Inside it, a ground-floor chamber opens into three niches set in a cross, and a ramp spirals up through the thickness of the wall toward an upper chamber. The bastion holds its own vaulted rooms, reached by curving corridors, and the side towers have tall, narrow chambers that feel almost like chimneys when you stand in them.

Around the triangle runs a long oval enclosure wall with gates and projecting towers pierced by slits, and beyond it lie the remains of the village that grew up in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. The site did not go quiet when the Nuragic world ended: people were still here in Roman times and into the early Middle Ages, and the name — in the local tongue roughly "the nuraghe of the tombs" — is linked to Roman funerary urns found at the edge of the complex. Archaeologists have worked here since the nineteenth century, from Filippo Vivanet and Antonio Taramelli to later campaigns by Ferruccio Barreca and investigations into the 1990s.

What makes the visit memorable is how much of the building you can actually walk through. Few nuraghi let you move from courtyard to keep to bastion chamber in one continuous sequence, feeling the weight of stone overhead the whole way; at Losa you can, and the plain around it is open enough that the silhouette stays with you long after you leave.

Getting there

The nuraghe stands on the Abbasanta plateau about 5 km from the village of Abbasanta and is signposted from the SS131, the main Cagliari–Sassari highway, near its junction with the road toward Nuoro and Olbia. The nearest larger town is Oristano, about 29 km away. The closest airport is Alghero-Fertilia (AHO), roughly 71 km in a straight line; a car is the practical way to reach the site.