Anyone landing at Olbia sees it before they even touch down: a block of white rock rising abruptly from the sea, with vertical walls and a flat top, completely out of scale with everything around it. It is Tavolara, and the first impression — that it has nothing to do with the rest of the coast — is geologically correct.
Around it lies one of the most regulated marine protected areas in Italy, where you can sail very little and see a great deal. It is worth understanding how it works before you point your bow at it.
A limestone block amid the granite
All of Gallura is granite. The islands of the La Maddalena Archipelago are granite. Molara and Molarotto, close by, are granite. Tavolara is not: it is a limestone-dolomite massif of Mesozoic origin, a sedimentary block resting on a granite base that surfaces on the western side and supports the limestone layer at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
It is this anomaly that gives it the shape you see from afar: walls rising almost vertically to the 565 metres of Punta Cannone, on an island six kilometres long and on average five hundred metres wide. At either end are two low, sandy peninsulas that seem to belong to another landscape: Spalmatore di Terra to the west and Spalmatore di Fuori to the east.
The eastern part, towards Punta Timone, has been home since the 1960s to a NATO telecommunications base, with antennas over two hundred metres tall and a military road partly in a tunnel. It is a restricted zone. The practical consequence for visitors is simple: the only part of Tavolara you can visit is Spalmatore di Terra, the western peninsula, where there is the beach, the landing stage, two restaurants and the homes of the island’s only family.
The kingdom, the legend and what is actually on record
Tavolara is described everywhere as “the smallest kingdom in the world”, with a dynasty of shepherd kings recognised by the House of Savoy and photographed at Buckingham Palace. It is a lovely story. But it is worth distinguishing what is documented from what is not, because the difference is clear.
Documented. Giuseppe Bertoleoni, born in La Maddalena in 1778, settled on the island in the early nineteenth century to raise goats, and built the first stone house there. His descendants succeeded one another on the island for generations — Paolo, Carlo and onwards to the present day — and are still there, with a few houses and the two restaurants. Their dates of birth and death appear in parish records.
Not documented. The visit of Charles Albert of Savoy in 1836 and the granting of the royal title: no deed has survived. The supposed parchment of investiture is said to have reached the prefecture of Sassari and then been lost. Neither the photograph of the “sovereigns of Tavolara” at Buckingham Palace nor the visit of Queen Victoria’s envoys appears in primary sources. And the Bertoleoni family does not feature in any Italian register of nobility: Tavolara is Italian territory, part of the municipality of Olbia, with no legal ambiguity whatsoever.
Even the most quoted anecdote — the goats with golden teeth, supposedly coloured by grazing on minerals — remains an unconfirmed folk tale.
None of this takes away from the story’s charm. A family that has lived for two centuries on a six-kilometre limestone rock is extraordinary in itself. But the correct way to tell it is “according to family tradition”, not “as is well known”.
At Spalmatore di Terra there is a small family cemetery, which guides call the cemetery of the kings: a few graves behind a fence, where the Bertoleonis rest along with a Sardinian historian who wished to be buried there. It is not a monument, and it is all the more moving for that.
Molara and Molarotto: the part you don’t touch
The two smaller islands of the archipelago have the opposite status to Tavolara, and in both cases the message is: look, don’t land.
Molara is granite, uninhabited and privately owned. It is not freely accessible: visits take place only through a cultural association, during limited periods between late spring and early autumn. Those who go find the remains of a medieval Romanesque church to the north-west, with traces of a settlement, and on the high ground to the south-east the remains of a fortification from the Giudicati period that tourist accounts attribute to a “Queen Bianca” — an attribution, again, not historically confirmed.
The island’s wildlife is the real reason for its protection: peregrine falcon, Audouin’s gull, European shag and hundreds of pairs of Yelkouan shearwater, whose breeding is however seriously compromised by a rat population. Feral livestock, goats and cattle, also live there. The presence of mouflon, which you often read about, is not confirmed by scientific sources.
What almost everyone simply calls “the Molara Pools” is the stretch of very shallow, transparent sea between the island and the coast, and it is the busiest anchorage in the entire protected area — regulated with georeferenced points and length limits for vessels.
Molarotto, the pink granite islet a little further east, falls instead within zone A, the highest level of protection: navigation prohibited, landing prohibited. It hosts seabird colonies so numerous that they change the colour of the rock, dominated by the European shag, and an endemic lizard that exists nowhere else.
How the protected area works
The Tavolara – Punta Coda Cavallo Marine Protected Area was established in the late 1990s and covers more than fifteen thousand hectares of sea, from Capo Ceraso to Punta Isuledda, across three municipalities: Olbia, Loiri Porto San Paolo and San Teodoro.
Some prohibitions apply everywhere, in every zone, and these are the ones to know by heart:
- Jet skis and towed sports are banned throughout the area, without exception.
- Anchoring on posidonia, other seagrasses and coralligenous reefs is prohibited everywhere. Drop anchor only on sandy or pebbly bottoms.
- Spearfishing is prohibited in all forms, recreational or professional.
- Untreated discharges and the collection of shells, sand and rocks are prohibited. Access to the dunes behind the beaches is prohibited.
Then there is the zoning. In the A zones — the southern tip of Cala di Levante on Tavolara, Punta del Papa, Punta del Passo Malo and the area around Molarotto — you may not sail, anchor, swim or dive: it is a strict nature reserve.
In the B and C zones you may sail with very tight speed limits: five knots within three hundred metres of the coast, ten knots between three hundred and six hundred metres, always at displacement speed. Swimming is unrestricted. Anchoring is permitted only on inert seabeds, with hull length limits that differ between zones B and C; larger vessels have dedicated, georeferenced circular areas.
Pleasure vessels over twenty-four metres must request authorisation from the managing body even just to pass through to an anchorage, and may only do so on a course perpendicular to the coast.
Diving deserves a note: independent diving, without a guide, is only permitted with prior authorisation, at specifically named sites, within an afternoon time slot, with at least a second-level certification and in groups of no more than six divers. Guided dives are reserved for authorised dive centres, on the moorings provided, with a cap on the number of divers at each site at any one time.
What you need, in practice, to go by boat
For a boater with a small craft or a vessel under twenty-four metres, simply sailing in zone B or C requires no authorisation: you just need to respect the speed limits and prohibitions.
You do, however, need authorisation from the managing body to moor at the buoy fields and jetties, with a fee that varies according to the length of the vessel and the duration of the stay. Reduced rates are available for residents of the three municipalities and for vessels with low-emission engines or fitted with waste-water holding tanks — an incentive worth asking about.
Moorings exist at Tavolara, Cala d’Ambra, Porto Istana and Salina Bamba, with a few buoys at Porto San Paolo and Spalmatore. There are only a few dozen places in all: in August they must be booked well in advance.
Those hiring a crewed boat rely on authorised operators, recognisable by the mandatory sticker on the hull showing the name and authorisation number. It is worth checking: charter and passenger transport activities are capped and allocated by tender, and the area also imposes an overall daily limit on the number of passengers who can be carried.
One warning worth more than any other: fees, lists of dive sites, number of buoys and detailed provisions are contained in regulations valid for one year, updated each season on an explicitly adaptive basis. Any figure you read last year is probably out of date. Check before you set off, every time.
How to get there, and what to do once ashore
Those without a boat reach Tavolara on the seasonal crossings from Porto San Paolo, in the municipality of Loiri Porto San Paolo: a short crossing that lands at Spalmatore di Terra. It is the simplest way, and in high season also the most crowded.
Ashore, the day is pared back, and that is part of its charm. There is the beach at Spalmatore, sheltered and with very shallow water. There are two restaurants, run by the island’s family, which work by reservation in summer. There is the small cemetery, which takes five minutes to visit and stays with you for a long time. And there is the rock face: the one rising vertically above your head, to be admired from below.
On excursions to the top, one thing must be made clear. In 2025 the Municipality of Olbia issued an ordinance banning climbing on the island, following an accident on the via ferrata, with an exception for qualified mountain guides for educational and scientific purposes. The measure provoked a strong reaction from local environmental guides. The current status of that ban must be checked before planning any ascent: it is exactly the kind of rule that changes from one season to the next, and no article can replace a phone call to the municipality or an authorised guide.
For those arriving in their own boat, the most useful practical note is about shade: Spalmatore di Terra is an exposed tongue of sand, and in the middle hours of July and August there is no shelter. The ideal stop is early morning or late afternoon, when the limestone face also changes colour.
Why the day should be planned backwards
There is a logic that applies to the whole protected area and that is worth adopting: start from the rules, not the places.
First check what is permitted in the current season — because the regulations are annual. Then look at the wind, which here decides whether the exposed side of the island is usable or not. Only at the end do you choose where to go. Those who do it the other way round, choosing the destination first, regularly end up discovering that the anchorage requires an authorisation they don’t have, or that their boat is too long for the zone where they wanted to stop.
The second tip concerns timing. Tour boats move en masse mid-morning and stay in the main areas until late afternoon. The Molara Pools at nine in the morning and at two in the afternoon are two different places.
The third is more mundane but decisive: there are no services here. No kiosks on the smaller islands, no refuelling, no guaranteed shade. Water, sun protection and a plan for lunch must be sorted out on land.
What you see underwater
The reason for all these rules becomes clear as soon as you put your head underwater. The posidonia meadows here are extensive and in good condition, and they drive everything else. Groupers are present and protected: in the only zone where recreational fishing is allowed, taking any species of grouper, brown meagre or shad is still prohibited.
This is also home to the ribbed Mediterranean limpet (Patella ferruginea), the most endangered marine invertebrate in the Mediterranean. From specimens in this area, the first larvae of the species ever produced in a laboratory were obtained, as part of a European restocking project: a detail that shows better than any brochure what a marine protected area really is.
On the surface you may spot bottlenose dolphins, Risso’s dolphins and — more rarely — fin whales. Cetacean watching is precisely regulated: minimum distances, maximum time spent nearby, only one vessel per approach zone, reduced speed. Here, even enthusiasm has a protocol.