Cala dei Gabbiani

Just south of Cala Mariolu, divided from it by one rocky spur, Cala dei Gabbiani is a 250-metre shore of flat pebbles in cream, white and pink, shut in by cliffs some 500 metres tall. Gulls crowding the cove at dusk gave it a recent name; older than the gulls is the shore's shared local name — the snowfleas beach.

Why it matters

The Baunei coast compresses its finest scenery into a handful of roadless coves, and this one carries a double history. Together with Cala Mariolu next door, the shoreline was traditionally known as "Ispulige de nie" — fleas of snow — for the scatter of small pale stones across the shallows.

The cove's natural architecture is unusually legible. It is a landslide beach: the flat, rounded stones underfoot are the debris of the rock walls behind, which rise about 500 metres and shelter the shore from everything but the sea. Northward the spur of Punta Ispuligi separates it from Mariolu; southward the ridge of Serra e' Lattone closes the horizon above the Ispuligidenie forest, the holm-oak and Mediterranean-wood belt that walkers descend through to reach the coast.

Birds complete the identity. Hundreds of gulls shelter in the cove overnight and stream out at first light — the origin, per the regional portal, of a name that is only decades old. Golden eagles and peregrine falcons patrol those same walls, sharing the air with Eleonora's falcons and European shags.

What to notice

The pebbles here are flatter and more colour-graded than at neighbouring coves: cream shading to rose, worn to discs that click underfoot in the shallows. The cliff wall shows the fracture planes from which the beach material came; the shoreline is still, geologically speaking, in motion.

At Punta Ispuligi, worked slipways and terraces recall the rocky spur's former role as a mooring point for merchant vessels loading coal produced by the furisteris, Baunei's charcoal burners. At dusk, gulls return to the cove and the walls fill with their calls.

Context and history

The cove's two names tell its story in order. The older one, Ispulige de nie, belongs to the working coastline of the Golgo shepherds and the furisteris, who burned charcoal in the woods of the plateau and coast and shipped it out from the spur of Punta Ispuligi — a trade recorded by the regional portal as active at this mooring until 1953, when roads finally reached the high ground and killed the economics of sea-borne coal.

The younger name, Cala dei Gabbiani, spread as tourism replaced trade: with gulls in residence and the cove's profile fixed on postcards, the descriptive name stuck. The cove remains part of the same continuous, cliff-locked shore that once bore a single name with its southern neighbour, Cala Mariolu.