Nuraghe Losa

A tri-lobed fortress of basalt rises from the Abbasanta plateau, its keep still climbing thirteen metres into the central Sardinian sky. Nuraghe Losa couples monumental Bronze Age engineering with an unusually long occupation story, from Middle Bronze Age builders through Roman funerary reuse and Byzantine times.

Why it matters

Most nuraghi survive as broken towers. Nuraghe Losa keeps its geometry legible: a central keep enclosed by a trilobed bastion with three smaller towers, wrapped in a curtain wall and an outer antemurale, with a sprawling settlement of hut foundations running out to about 3.5 hectares across the plateau. The Ministry of Culture catalog describes its state of conservation as very good, and the regional tourism portal ranks it among the major megalithic monuments of the island's centre. The corridors lead to three tholos-vaulted chambers, and a clockwise spiral stair climbs through the keep to the upper room. Few prehistoric buildings in the Mediterranean let you read a defence plan this completely on the ground.

What to notice

The raised main entrance lies on the facade side. A straight corridor cuts through the bastion to the keep, while the rear tower hides a second, smaller doorway of its own. Inside the central tower, the ground chamber opens onto three niches arranged in a cross beneath a tholos vault of progressively smaller basalt blocks.

The side towers contain chambers covered by false domes; the rear tower has its own entrance. The smaller towers also contain tall, narrow well-shafts used for storing food and materials, and a cistern sits at the base of the western turret. Outside, in front of the facade, a large circular building with two opposed entrances, two niches and five slits is interpreted as a meeting hut for the community. A dismantled giants' tomb of finely worked blocks lies about 120 metres to the south-west, and a possible sacred spring stood 400 metres to the north-east.

Context and history

The complex took shape in the Middle Bronze Age, in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, according to the regional tourism authority. Around the bastion grew a village occupied from the Recent Bronze Age into the Iron Age, between the thirteenth and ninth centuries BC. Life here outlasted the nuragic order itself: the catalog records late Punic, Roman and late Roman buildings among the huts, and the ministry's chronology runs from the fifteenth to the ninth century BC with occupation continuing into the Byzantine period of the seventh and eighth centuries. The Romans turned the edges of the site into burial ground, carving cinerary urns from the rock; the old name nurache 'e losas, the nuraghe of the tombs, remembers them.

Excavation has run since the nineteenth century, and the monument was formally declared of cultural interest in 2004. Finds from other regional sites came here too: the material excavated at the nuraghe Santa Barbara in Villanova Truschedu is kept in the exhibition hall at Losa.