Santa Cristina nuragic site

The sacred well of Santa Cristina is the most refined building of Sardinia's Nuragic civilisation. A keyhole-shaped opening in the ground leads down a stone staircase of 25 steps, about 3.5 metres wide at the top and narrowing to 1.4 metres at the bottom, into a circular chamber where spring water still rises. Above the stairs, the stepped lintels of the ceiling mirror the steps below, so that the descent seems to happen inside an upside-down staircase. The chamber is roofed by a corbelled dome almost 7 metres high, built of finely dressed basalt courses that close at the top in a small opening of about 35 centimetres at ground level.

The well was built around the eleventh century BC, and its precision has impressed visitors since the nineteenth century: in 1860 Alberto La Marmora compared it to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, and the archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu later called it the culmination of the Nuragic water temples. The basalt blocks were laid so that each course projects slightly beyond the one above, giving the walls a finely serrated profile. An elliptical enclosure marks off the sacred ground, and around it lie the remains of a round meeting hut about 10 metres across with a stone bench running along its wall, an enclosure that may have held animals for offerings, and a row of small huts that may have been shops serving the sanctuary. Bronze figurines and votive objects found here, along with much later Phoenician gold jewellery, show that the water cult drew worshippers over a long period. Some researchers argue that the shaft was aligned with the sky: at the major lunar standstill, every eighteen and a half years, the moon shines down through the opening onto the water, an interpretation still debated.

About 200 metres away, among wild olive trees, stands an older single-tower nuraghe whose ground-floor chamber and vault survive intact, together with long stone huts of uncertain date and the unexcavated traces of a village. The site takes its name from the country church of Santa Cristina, first documented in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is surrounded by 36 small pilgrim houses, the muristenes or cumbessias, built from the eighteenth century onward for the novena held before the saint's feast. The tradition of gathering at the spring has thus lasted, in one form or another, for three thousand years.

Getting there

The sanctuary lies on the Abbasanta plateau in the municipality of Paulilatino, about 21 km from Oristano, the nearest city. The nearest airport is Alghero-Fertilia Airport (AHO), about 74 km away.