A few kilometres from the marinas of Porto Cervo, where the name Arzachena evokes yachts and society seasons, there is another Arzachena that is 6,000 years old and that most visitors never see. Eight archaeological sites spread across three areas, telling a story far longer than the one that began in 1962.
It is not a park in the usual sense of the word: there is no single entrance, no set route. They are monuments scattered through the Gallura countryside, each with its own ticket office and custodian. And that may well be the best way to visit them.
First of all: what they are not
Two names here create more confusion than they clear up, and it is worth sorting them out straight away.
The giants’ tombs have nothing to do with giants. They are collective burials from the Nuragic age, and the name is popular and late: it comes from the monumental scale of the structures, not the height of those buried in them. Archaeology instead links their shape to a precise figure: the elongated, apsed body like the muzzle of a bull, the curved façade of the exedra like horns. This interpretation is Giovanni Lilliu’s, the father of Nuragic archaeology.
The megalithic circles, moreover, are not Nuragic at all. They are Neolithic, and predate the giants’ tombs by about two millennia. Confusing them is the most common mistake, and it makes the whole sequence lose its meaning: in Arzachena you see two distinct civilisations, separated by an enormous span of time, occupying the same landscape.
Li Muri: the oldest and strangest site
The Li Muri necropolis is the starting point, both chronologically and conceptually. It is Neolithic — official sources date it between the fifth and fourth millennia BC, with some notable discrepancies between them, so any single date you read elsewhere should be treated with caution.
Four tangent burial circles, between five and eight and a half metres in diameter. Each circle is a series of slabs set on edge that contained a mound of earth and stones; in the centre, a stone cist held the deceased. Their original appearance was not that of open stone circles, as we imagine today, but of artificial mounds side by side. Menhirs set into the outer circle marked the tombs, or represented deities and the souls of the dead.
What makes Li Muri unique is the ritual. While elsewhere in Neolithic Sardinia burial was collective, here it was individual: one, at most two bodies, in a crouched position, sprinkled with red ochre — the colour of regeneration. Grave goods included flint blades, steatite necklaces and polished stone axes.
It is a type found only in Gallura, so much so that archaeologists speak of an “Arzachena culture”. And the closest parallels are not found elsewhere on the island, but in southern Corsica, Catalonia and the French Midi: six thousand years ago, this corner of Sardinia looked west.
A detail worth the trip: set apart at Li Muri stands a small Bronze Age passage tomb built on top of an earlier circle. The overlap of the two eras is not a theory: you can see it.
Li Lolghi and Coddu ‘Ecchju: the two great tombs
A short distance from Li Muri, and belonging to a completely different world, is Li Lolghi: one of the largest giants’ tombs in Sardinia, twenty-seven metres long in total. Here too the stratigraphy tells of two periods. The original core is a small covered gallery from the Early Bronze Age; the semicircular façade, the corridor and the mound that make it monumental today were added centuries later. The monolithic stele in the centre is more than three and a half metres tall.
Coddu ‘Ecchju — also written Coddu Vecchju — has the same two-phase history and a record: its arched stele, just over four metres high, is the tallest on the island. It was probably the cemetery of the nearby village of La Prisgiona, six hundred metres away.
It is worth understanding how they worked. The small arched opening at the base of the stele, the one everyone poses in front of, was not used to pass bodies through: it was too narrow. It was used to introduce offerings in pottery vessels. Burial probably took place from above, by removing a covering slab.
The exedra — the semicircular space in front of the façade — was the ceremonial area. Fragments of food and drink containers found right there confirm that ritual meals were eaten in honour of the dead and the ancestors. Ancient sources even record incubation rites: people slept by the tomb, on the benches of the exedra, to receive omens or healing.
One last striking fact: burial was collective regardless of age, sex or social role. There were no chiefs in these tombs.
La Prisgiona: the village
If the tombs tell us how people died, La Prisgiona tells us how they lived, and it is the site that most surprises those expecting only stones.
It is a complex nuraghe: a central tholos keep with two side towers joined by a triangular bastion, and a false-dome chamber almost seven metres high. But the nuraghe is only the centre. Around it extends a village of about a hundred huts over four hectares, with a courtyard housing what archaeologists call the Meeting Hut.
In the courtyard there is a well more than seven metres deep, still active, from which askoid jugs emerged — the most refined Nuragic pottery, the kind that travelled across the Mediterranean. The site was inhabited from the fourteenth to the early eighth century BC, with later Roman occupation.
The Malchittu area: the hybrid nuraghe and the temple
The third area, towards Olbia, has three monuments that could hardly be more different.
Nuraghe Albucciu is a case study: a “mixed” nuraghe, combining features of the corridor nuraghe with devices typical of the tholos type, built by exploiting a granite outcrop rather than rising from scratch. Its straight façade measures twenty metres.
The nearby Moru giants’ tomb was the burial place of Albucciu’s inhabitants, and has an architectural peculiarity: it is the only example in the Arzachena area with a façade built in courses of blocks rather than with slabs set on edge. It is the technical evolution of the giants’ tombs, caught on the spot. And it remained a sacred place for a very long time: a Punic coin and a cippus bearing the symbol of Tanit were found there, evidence of worship centuries after Nuragic use had ended.
Finally, the Malchittu temple is the rarest and most demanding monument. It is a place of worship with a rectangular, apsed plan and an atrium, of the so-called “megaron” type, and still preserves its bench, seats and central hearth. It stands at an altitude of a hundred and twenty metres and can only be reached on foot: about a kilometre and a half of uphill path, the last stretch steep and over rock. Proper shoes are needed. It is the most useful piece of information in this whole guide for anyone arriving from the coast in sandals.
The eighth site, which isn’t a monument
The count reaches eight thanks to the Fungo (“Mushroom”), in Gallurese Monti Incappiddhatu, a granite mass shaped by the wind a short walk from the centre of Arzachena. Nobody built it: it is erosion. But excavations have shown that it was used as a rock shelter in the late Neolithic and in the Nuragic period, which makes it a dwelling site in every respect. It is free to visit, and the only one of the eight that needs no ticket.
A Gallura that looked west
There is one fact worth keeping in mind as you go round these sites, because it overturns the common idea of an isolated island.
Gallura’s megalithic circles have no parallels in the rest of Sardinia, but they do — close ones — in southern Corsica, Catalonia and the French Midi. They belong to western European megalithism, the great family of stone funerary architecture that from the Neolithic onwards runs along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. In other words: in the fifth millennium BC this corner of Sardinia was culturally closer to Corsica and Provence than to the centre of its own island.
Millennia later, the Nuragic age turned the perspective around. The askoid jugs found in the well at La Prisgiona belong to a class of pottery that circulated throughout the Mediterranean; in the Late and Final Bronze Age, Nuragic Sardinia was an active trading hub, not a periphery. And the Moru giants’ tomb continued to be a place of worship in the Punic period, as a coin and a symbol of Tanit attest — that is, when the Carthaginians had already arrived and the original builders had been dead for centuries.
These monuments do not tell the story of a closed people. They tell of a land that changed direction several times, and that went on regarding the same places as sacred even when it no longer understood them.
Why they are here, and not elsewhere
Looking at the countryside around the sites, you understand the settlement logic, and it is the same one that shapes Gallura today.
Granite is both the raw material and the constraint: you build with what you have, and Albucciu even incorporates a rock outcrop into its structure instead of levelling it. As granite breaks down it gives poor, sandy soils, good for grazing and vines, not for wheat. The result is a low-density landscape of scattered settlements, which was already like this in the Bronze Age and still is now.
Then there is water, which decides everything. The well at La Prisgiona, more than seven metres deep, is still active after three thousand years: that village grew there because there was water to drink. The tombs lie a short distance from the settlements — six hundred metres between La Prisgiona and Coddu ‘Ecchju, two hundred between Albucciu and Moru — far enough to separate the living from the dead, close enough to keep them in sight.
The Malchittu temple, on the other hand, stands high up and far from everything. It was not a place you passed through: it was a place you went to on purpose. That is why, even today, you can only get there on foot.
The two and a half thousand blank pages
There is one aspect of this story that is rarely told, and that the municipality itself admits with remarkable honesty: between the Neolithic circles of Li Muri and the first nuraghi run around two and a half thousand years about which very little is known. “The book of Arzachena’s history still has many blank pages”, reads the park’s official website.
Nor was the end of the Nuragic civilisation an event, but a long dissolution. The construction of new nuraghi stopped as early as around the twelfth century BC; political decline began with Carthaginian expansion and continued with Roman expansion, but in the island’s inland areas traces of that culture survived for centuries. Be wary of anyone who gives you a date for its disappearance.
How to visit
The ticket is cumulative and sliding-scale: you buy entry to between one and seven monuments, with a decreasing price per monument. There are also packages for single areas — Malchittu, Capichera, Li Muri — designed for those who only have time for one zone.
There is no single entrance: each area has its own ticket office and its own phone number. A guide is not compulsory: guided tours and audio guides are available, but you can explore on your own. The sites are open all year round and, when an area is closed, you can book a visit by phone.
Opening hours change during the year and sometimes even on individual days, for logistical reasons or events: it is the one thing worth checking the day before on the municipality’s website, rather than trusting what you read elsewhere.
If you have half a day, the densest combination is the Capichera area: La Prisgiona and Coddu ‘Ecchju are six hundred metres apart and together tell the story of the village and its cemetery. If you have a whole day, add Li Muri and Li Lolghi, and you will have crossed two thousand years in an afternoon.