Nuraghe Losa

Off the SS 131 on Abbasanta's basalt plateau stands Nuraghe Losa, ranked by the regional tourism board among Sardinia's most famous and best-preserved megalithic monuments. Its central tower still stands thirteen metres high, and the surrounding site holds a Bronze Age village, a giants' tomb and an ethnographic museum.

Why it matters

Nuraghe Losa is the benchmark for reading a complex nuraghe, the multi-towered form that Sardinia's Bronze Age builders evolved beyond the single tower. Because so much of the fabric survives — keep, bastion, outworks, stair — the building logic of a nuragic stronghold can be followed stone by stone, with no reconstruction to take on trust. The regional tourism board counts it among the island's most famous and best-preserved megalithic monuments.

Its second distinction is time depth. The plateau was occupied from the Middle Bronze Age, and activity here runs without a clean break through the Iron Age, the Punic and Roman periods and into the Byzantine era. Few nuragic sites anywhere show so clearly how one monument served successive worlds.

What to notice

The complex forms an equilateral triangle of basalt blocks, and from certain angles the whole structure resembles the prow of a ship driving across the plateau. At the triangle's centre rises the keep, still thirteen metres high; its ground-floor chamber has three niches arranged in a cross, and a spiral ramp climbs inside the wall to the upper chamber.

Around the keep, three secondary towers with false-dome (tholos) chambers are knitted together by curtain masonry, with shafts built into the walls that served as storage silos. An outer oval wall with gates and two projecting turrets rings the whole; beyond it, an antemurale — a forward wall — extends to the north and west, with a cistern at the western turret. Before the main facade stands a large round building with two opposing doorways and a ring of niches, read as a meeting hut for the community.

A ruined giants' tomb lies about 120 metres to the southwest, and the site of a possible sacred well is recorded some 400 metres northeast, though nothing of it is visible today.

Context and history

The central trilobed building belongs to the Middle Bronze Age; it dates to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE. The antemurale and the village of circular huts followed between the thirteenth and ninth centuries BCE, the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. Partial abandonment came in the early Iron Age, yet the area was never simply left behind: the settlement around the nuraghe spread over roughly 3.5 hectares and carries Nuragic, late-Punic, Roman and Byzantine layers, only part of which has been excavated.

The Roman period left a mark on the monument's very name. Cinerary urns carved into the rock nearby gave rise to the traditional form nurache 'e losas, the nuraghe of the tombs, and the funerary use of the surrounding ground belongs to that era. Systematic excavation began in the nineteenth century, when interest in the nuragic civilization was consolidating into organized archaeology, and work on the site has continued in various forms since.