A visit to the Bronze Age structure at Nuraghe Arrubiu shows one of the best largest examples left by the Nuragic civilisation of Sardinia. There are around 7000 nuraghes on the island – ranging from single towers to multi towered buildings surrounded by smaller stone huts, built between 1900BC and 700BC. Each is a huge investment in time and effort and they are apparently unique to the island, although there are similarities to structures on neighbouring Corsica.
Visiting Nuraghe Arrubiu
Nuraghe Arrubiu is a major tourist attraction on the island and as such has a proper car park, a cafe, exhibition and English speaking guides, if you opt for a tour, so is an easy visit. It is a bit out of the way in the interior of the island but is well signposted and easy to find.
My Experience
This is taken from my Sardinian travel blog here:
Next stop was on our Sardinian road trip was another nuraghe, this one at Nuraghe Arrubiu, which was a proper tourist site with a cafe – so we could finally have breakfast – and paid for admission. This was another huge site with walls maybe 10m high and 3m thick and multiple buildings and towers radiating from the centre.
There were more wild flowers including poppies as well as lots of basking lizards. In this tower you could see the spiral stairs although they have been blocked off part way up for ‘safety reasons’. The staff here were very helpful and gave us an English leaflet describing the site, the purpose of each room and what had been found in excavations.
It was impressive how cold some of the interior rooms were considering it was around 30 degrees C outside. The main tower was originally over 25m high which is pretty impressive for something built 1500 years before the Roman Empire was founded.
Nuraghe Arrubiu Photo Gallery
History
Copied from the Wiki link shown in the References section:
The Nuraghe Arrubiu is one of the largest nuraghes in Sardinia. It is in Orroli, in the province of South Sardinia. Its name means “red nuraghe” in the Sardinian language, which derives from the basalt stones it had been built with.
The structure was built during the fifteenth century BC; the main tower originally reached a height of between 25 and 30 metres, making it one of the tallest structures in Bronze Age Europe. The main structure, which is made up of five towers, is protected by two secondary walls, making a total of 21 towers. The area covered by the complex is ca. 3000 square metres. The nuraghe was also provided with a complex drainage system that provided the cistern with water.
References
The site homepage is here but is in Italian.
Information on the Nuragic civilisation is on the Wiki page here.
There is a brief write up on Wiki of Nuraghe Arrubiu here and the history above was copied from there.