Funtanamare

West of Iglesias, the Golfo del Leone unfurls a three-kilometre ribbon of golden-pink sand called Funtanamare. Fossil dunes and limestone cliffs stand behind it, maestrale winds rake it when they blow, and the mining heritage of the Iglesiente still leaves its marks along this wild, open shore.

Why it matters

Few stretches of the Iglesiente coast carry so much landscape into one shoreline. Funtanamare is the long northern section of the Marina di Gonnesa, part of the wide bay the regional tourism portal ranks among the coast's finest, and it keeps a wildness its neighbours have traded away: roughly three kilometres of fine, golden-to-pinkish sand with no rock shelter for hundreds of metres in either direction. The water shifts from emerald to deep blue over a low sandy bed that only further out turns pebbly. Behind the beach, fossil dunes clothed in Mediterranean vegetation climb to limestone cliffs and a pine grove. The coast’s exposure to the maestrale also makes Funtanamare a place for windsurfing and kitesurfing. And everywhere the mining story of the Iglesiente presses close, from the red heaps of Monteponi on the road in to the old workings along the sand itself.

What to notice

The beach’s industrial past remains visible along the shore. At its southern end stands the eighteenth-century tonnara of Porto Paglia, the tuna fishery that anchored this coast for two centuries; at the northern end, the mining village of Fontanamare — the variant spelling of the same name — marks where the extractive economy lived. Mineral loads were brought to this shoreline and carried by small boats, the bilancelle, across to San Pietro island. An outlet of the Umberto I drainage gallery, dated 1875, survives near the beach, together with the ruins of Second World War fortifications.

Then turn inland. The sa Masa marsh lies beside the coast and shelters rare waterbirds, among them the purple swamphen and the marbled duck. The marsh also attracts herons and seasonal flamingos.

Context and history

Gonnesa's shoreline was worked long before it was swum. Lead, silver, copper and zinc in the hills behind the coast drew Phoenician, Punic and Roman interest; extraction turned intensive from the early nineteenth century and carried on past the Second World War. The Porto Paglia tonnara dates to the second half of the eighteenth century and operated until 1974; restoration later turned the fishery and its fishermen’s houses into a residential complex. A small chapel stands on the rocks beside it. Behind the beach, the mining town carried its own heavy dates: in May 1906 a workers' uprising for better conditions was put down by force, leaving three dead and seventeen wounded, an episode that still colours how this coast remembers its industry.