Laguna di Santa Caterina

Behind a sand bar on the Gulf of Palmas in south-western Sardinia lies the Laguna di Santa Caterina, a wetland of almost 700 hectares where pink flamingos, avocets and marsh harriers feed among salt marshes and coastal dunes.

Why it matters

The lagoon is a Special Area of Conservation, listed in the European Natura 2000 network as site ITB042223 "Stagno di Santa Caterina", covering 625 hectares in the municipalities of San Giovanni Suergiu and Sant'Antioco; the regional tourism authority describes the wider natural oasis as almost 700 hectares. Its biodiversity is the point: the regional portal counts 187 plant entities here, including a notable population of Salicornia strobilacea, while the conservation record notes a halophyte association with Atriplex portulacoides and the bizarre crimson parasitic Cynomorium coccineum, rare in the Mediterranean. For birdwatchers the lagoon is a working landmark of the Sulcis — a stop on the migration routes that funnel along the coast towards the island of Sant'Antioco.

What to notice

The bird list rewards patience in any season. The regional page records pink flamingos, grey herons, avocets, black-winged stilts, cormorants, marsh harriers, yellow-legged gulls, night herons and little bitterns, while the local tourism portal adds common terns, little terns, slender-billed gulls and coots. Water turtles and the emerald toad live in the margins. The setting is easy to read from the ground: a shallow lagoon — average depth around half a metre, at most about two — separated from the sea by a strip of sand that has built up over millennia, with the salt pans of Sant'Antioco beyond. On the landward side, a cycle and pedestrian path follows the water's edge.

Context and history

The lagoon took shape where the alluvial deposits of the Rio Palmas built a sandy bar across a sea inlet; today it is fed by two watercourses, the Rio Palmas and the Rio Sassu. People have used it intensively: salt has been extracted from these waters since antiquity, and until the middle of the twentieth century the lagoon operated as a fish farm. In the 1960s canalisation works divided the fresh water from the brackish, and the lagoon's outflow now feeds the salt pans of Sant'Antioco through the Porto Pino canal — pans that the regional tourism authority ranks among the most important in Italy. The transition from working water to protected wetland came with the Natura 2000 designation, which formally recognised the site's community interest after decades of mixed use.