Touring Sardinia
May. 28th, 2025 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerItaly Travelog #18
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 10am
We've been in Sardinia for almost a day at this point. We've been taking it easy for the most part. Yesterday we had lunch with colleagues after arrival, then I crashed in our room for a few hours before the reception dinner. This morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the hotel then got ready for the day's outing— a cave tour. While we're en route to the cave I'm jotting down a few notes about Sardinia thus far.
The first is that it's beautiful here, and rural. Sardinia has a population of about 1.6 million. That may seem like a lot; it'd be a fair sized city, if it were a city. But Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean. A size comparison shows it's about the size of Vermont. ...Well, Vermont has 6500,000 people, so Sardinia is less rural than Vermont. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, which is only slightly larger than Sardinia and has 3x the population.
Part of what makes Sardinia feel so rural is that the coast is very wilderness-y. There are no towns along the rugged coastline, no multi-million-dollar mansions, no high-rise resort hotels. I've heard accounts from two people now, including a local archaeology Ph.D., that the "no towns" thing is because of the historic threats of invasion and piracy. Occupants of the island from hundreds of years ago to thousands of years ago built villages inland so they wouldn't be so exposed to marauders; whether the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Moors, or the Spanish.
Speaking of the Spanish, it's actually the Catalans who've had a strong influence here. Our tour guide (the aforementioned archaeology Ph.D.) mentioned that with a broad smile because two of our companions on our little group trek are Catalan, from Barcelona. For hundreds of years during the Middle Ages Catalans ruled the island. There are still communities of Catalans on the island today, though they are in the north and we're traveling around the far south.
One other thing that strikes me as we're driving around these remote parts of the coast in Sardinia is that it looks and feels a lot like California. Except for the road signs being in Italian I could almost swear I'm on the central coast. It's the rugged coast, the mountains near the water, and the types of trees and shrubs all around us. Climate-wise, it's a similar climate.
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 10am
We've been in Sardinia for almost a day at this point. We've been taking it easy for the most part. Yesterday we had lunch with colleagues after arrival, then I crashed in our room for a few hours before the reception dinner. This morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the hotel then got ready for the day's outing— a cave tour. While we're en route to the cave I'm jotting down a few notes about Sardinia thus far.
The first is that it's beautiful here, and rural. Sardinia has a population of about 1.6 million. That may seem like a lot; it'd be a fair sized city, if it were a city. But Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean. A size comparison shows it's about the size of Vermont. ...Well, Vermont has 6500,000 people, so Sardinia is less rural than Vermont. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, which is only slightly larger than Sardinia and has 3x the population.
Part of what makes Sardinia feel so rural is that the coast is very wilderness-y. There are no towns along the rugged coastline, no multi-million-dollar mansions, no high-rise resort hotels. I've heard accounts from two people now, including a local archaeology Ph.D., that the "no towns" thing is because of the historic threats of invasion and piracy. Occupants of the island from hundreds of years ago to thousands of years ago built villages inland so they wouldn't be so exposed to marauders; whether the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Moors, or the Spanish.
Speaking of the Spanish, it's actually the Catalans who've had a strong influence here. Our tour guide (the aforementioned archaeology Ph.D.) mentioned that with a broad smile because two of our companions on our little group trek are Catalan, from Barcelona. For hundreds of years during the Middle Ages Catalans ruled the island. There are still communities of Catalans on the island today, though they are in the north and we're traveling around the far south.
One other thing that strikes me as we're driving around these remote parts of the coast in Sardinia is that it looks and feels a lot like California. Except for the road signs being in Italian I could almost swear I'm on the central coast. It's the rugged coast, the mountains near the water, and the types of trees and shrubs all around us. Climate-wise, it's a similar climate.
