Torre di Longonsardo

Granite walls eleven metres high crown the promontory above Santa Teresa Gallura, where the Torre di Longonsardo has faced the Bocche di Bonifacio since the 1570s. Raised under Philip II to hold off Barbary raids, the great tower of the Gallura coast is today the town's defining monument.

Why it matters

The Torre di Longonsardo is one of the major coastal towers of Gallura, built to watch the island’s northern waters. It stands on the headland northeast of the centre, between the bay of Santa Reparata and the inlet of the old port, almost exactly where a medieval castle is recorded to have stood. From the terrace, some forty metres above the sea, the view runs across the strait to Corsica and down over the crescent of Rena Bianca at the tower's feet. For the town — founded only in 1808, long after the tower — this older structure is the anchor of identity.

What to notice

The architecture explains the engineering of coastal defence. The base swells to a diameter of nineteen metres before the cylindrical upper body narrows to about sixteen, with an average height of eleven metres; the regional page notes the granite may have been quarried from the ruins of the earlier castle. The original entrance sits six metres above the ground, reachable before modern times only by rope ladder, and opens into the casemate — a bomb-proof domed chamber some ten metres across, held up by a central pillar, from which a staircase climbs inside the wall to the terrace. Look for the remains of the curtain wall at the base, the cistern that stored rainwater beneath the floor, and the rainwater basin that still survives against the south-eastern wall. The metal staircases visitors use today were added in the twentieth century.

Context and history

The tower grew out of a defence system, not a single decision. A watch over this port is documented from February 1556, and the tower itself probably stood by 1577, when it appears on the Carta della Sardegna of the architect Rocco Capellino — built within Philip II's island-wide programme of coastal fortification against corsair raids. Its name came from the fourteenth-century castle of Longonsardo, destroyed in 1422, whose memory it preserved; after the Savoy founding of the town it also became known as the Torre di Santa Teresa. Archive documents classify it as a tower de armas, a gagliarda built to hold a garrison and heavy weapons: between 1767 and 1794 an alcaide commanded an artilleryman and four soldiers here. Late-eighteenth-century works reshaped the complex — a general restructuring in 1777, then in 1791 a dome-shaped mezzaluna on the parade ground and a trapezoidal rivellino at the base with barracks, a bread oven and a grain mill. In June 1802 rebels led by the priest Sanna Corda seized the tower; royal troops retook it and the ringleaders were executed, and a decree of 12 August 1808 later ordered the new town. The Reale Amministrazione delle Torri was suppressed in 1842 and the tower was demilitarized soon after; in the Second World War a paratrooper unit was housed here and built the external staircase.