Seven thousand towers on one island
Drive across Sardinia and they keep appearing: on ridges, by springs, at the edge of plateaus. About 7,000 nuraghi are known, roughly one for every 3.5 square kilometres of the island. Nothing quite like them exists anywhere else, although they share the taste for huge stone with the megaliths of Neolithic Europe and with other Bronze Age towers, such as the talaiots of the Balearic Islands and the towers of Corsica.
A nuraghe is a tower of dry stone, shaped like a truncated cone. The main tower is called the mastio, the keep. Even when the top has fallen you can recognise one: thick walls sloping inwards, a doorway under a massive lintel, a round chamber with small niches in the walls, and the first steps of a stair climbing inside the masonry.
How do you roof a room without mortar?
With a trick called corbelling. Each ring of stones is laid a little further in than the one below, so the walls lean inwards course by course until only a small opening is left, which a single stone closes. The result looks like the inside of a beehive, and archaeologists call it a tholos, from the Greek word for a round building with a domed roof. Weight, friction and long stones running deep into the wall hold it together, and many of these vaults are still standing after more than 3,000 years.
Builders used whatever stone was local: basalt or trachyte in some areas, granite or limestone in others. Big blocks face the outside, smaller ones fill the core. Ramps, sledges, ropes and levers were enough to set even the largest pieces, and the stair inside the wall rose with the building, giving the builders a way up to the next course.
From a single tower to a castle
The earliest nuraghi are low, massive platforms crossed by corridors. Then come single towers, with the round chamber and a stair to an upper terrace. Many sites kept growing: a bastion of two, three or more side towers was added around the first, enclosing a courtyard that often holds a well, and a village spread outside the walls.
Su Nuraxi, at Barumini, is the classic example. Its central tower, built in the seventeenth century BCE, was almost 19 m tall, with three chambers stacked one above the other; four corner towers joined by a curtain wall went up around it later in the Bronze Age. At Santu Antine, near Torralba, the central tower still rises 17 m and once had three floors and a terrace.
A village around the tower
The tower was never alone for long. Many nuraghi stand among clusters of round huts, with lanes, work yards and drains between them. Some huts have a stone bench running round the inside wall, where people sat facing each other; archaeologists call them meeting huts. The finds are everyday: hearths, pottery, loom weights, food remains, sometimes bronze.
Fortress, farm or temple?
All three, probably, at different times and places. Height, thick walls and narrow entrances say defence. Hearths, storage jars and worn floors say people lived and worked there. The meeting huts and the care given to thresholds suggest gatherings and ritual. Many towers can see each other across the landscape, which has fed theories about fire signals, though the evidence for them is thin. One-word answers fit badly because uses changed over a thousand years.
Seen against the wider story of prehistoric architecture, the nuraghi are one of the boldest uses of dry stone in Bronze Age Europe.
Where to see them
Start with Su Nuraxi at Barumini, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, visited with a guide. In the north, Santu Antine near Torralba and Palmavera near Alghero are easy to reach; in the centre of the island, Losa near Abbasanta stands just off the main road. Opening times change with the seasons, so check each site‘s official page before you go.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Su Nuraxi di Barumini” (1997).
- Fondazione Barumini, “Su Nuraxi of Barumini”.
- Sardegna Turismo, “Nuraghe Santu Antine” and “Nuraghe Losa”.
- Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Sardegna Cultura, “I nuraghi”.
- G. Lilliu, La civiltà dei Sardi dal Paleolitico all’età dei nuraghi (Nuova ERI, 1988).
