Porto Flavia

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. Behind it, the rock is hollow: Porto Flavia is a harbour built inside a mountain, a pair of tunnels and giant storage silos carved into the cliff so that ore could be poured by gravity straight into the holds of ships waiting below. Finished in 1924, it was an engineering feat with no real equivalent elsewhere.

The mines of Masua, in the Iglesiente district, produced zinc and lead, and in 1922 they were bought by the Belgian Vieille Montagne company. Until then the ore left the coast in the most laborious way imaginable: sailors from Carloforte carried it on their shoulders in wicker baskets, loaded it onto small two-masted boats and sailed it some 30 km to their island, where it was transferred again to steamships bound for foundries in France, Belgium and Germany. Boats sank, and in bad weather loading a single steamer could take two months. The engineer Cesare Vecelli was asked to find a better way. He chose this cliff because the water below was deep and sheltered, and drew up a plan of two superimposed galleries about 600 metres long, linked by nine vertical reservoirs cut into the rock, each 20 metres high and together holding more than 10,000 tonnes of ore. An electric train in the upper tunnel tipped the ore into the silos; a conveyor belt in the lower tunnel, 16 metres above the sea, collected it and fed an extendable arm that swung out over a moored ship. A full cargo could now be loaded in about two days.

Miners skilled in explosives and climbing worked day and night, drilling the upper gallery from the land side and the lower one from the cliff face while hanging on ropes, and the whole work was done in two years. The company's owner asked for the decorative towers and nameplates on the seaward ends as a mark of prestige, and Vecelli named the port after his daughter Flavia, born in 1924. Porto Flavia cut transport costs dramatically and paid for itself within two years; it remained in use until mining at Masua ended in the 1990s. The nearby town of Iglesias, a royal city under Aragonese and Spanish rule and for centuries the centre of a district that produced lead, zinc and silver, sits in the hills at about 190 metres above the sea.

Getting there

Porto Flavia is near the village of Nebida-Masua on the coast road west of Iglesias, about 12 km from the town. Cagliari Elmas Airport (CAG) is about 57 km away.