Cala Reale

On the sheltered eastern shore of Asinara, Cala Reale pairs a broad natural harbour with a compact late nineteenth-century village. A royal name, a lazaretto, a quarantine station and prison-era buildings survive around the waterfront, and the park’s sea observatory and memorial sites reflect its later history.

Why it matters

Cala Reale is the landing where Asinara's layered past concentrates. The bay cuts deep into the island's eastern coast, and its broad natural harbour has been known since antiquity. Around the quay stands a village built at the close of the nineteenth century, when the Italian state turned the island into a lazaretto and agricultural penal colony, displacing its residents. The same buildings subsequently served as a hospital and maritime quarantine station; they now form part of the national park’s heritage. Royal visits, epidemic defence, imprisonment and now conservation follow one another within a few hundred metres of shoreline.

What to notice

The village fabric reflects this layered history. The waterfront buildings date to the penal-colony decades. The church and small Austro-Hungarian chapel beside the bay have also been restored. Below the water, the bay keeps quieter evidence: a Roman ship of the fourth century AD, found in 1995 near the lazzaretto jetty, was carrying containers of fish preserves from the Iberian peninsula towards Rome.

The park’s Osservatorio del Mare occupies a former lighthouse keeper’s residence from the early 1900s. Opened in 2012 with the CRAMA association, it includes recovery tanks and the Baia delle Tartarughe, where stranded loggerhead turtles are rehabilitated before release.

Nearby, Cala Sant’Andrea and Cala dei Ponzesi are also part of Asinara’s protected coast.

Context and history

The island's fate turned in 1885, when the Chamber approved the creation of a lazaretto and an agricultural penal colony at Asinara. The resident population was forced out; some of those families crossed the gulf and founded Stintino. From then on, convict labour worked the island's farms and herds, and the maritime quarantine station received ship crews suspected of carrying cholera and tuberculosis, remaining active until the years after the Second World War.

In 1915 thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners, many of them survivors of the forced marches out of Serbia, were confined here; large numbers died and were buried inland. The ossuary at Campu Perdu, built in the 1930s, gathers their remains. The name Cala Reale itself derives from the residence of the Savoy royal family, who came to visit the lazaretto beside the bay.

After the penal establishment wound down, the national park was created in 1997, and the former royal building and its neighbours were converted to the park's own use.