Two Weeks in Sardinia: A Road-Trip Itinerary from Cagliari to Ogliastra - Example Timeline | Boromlia
A Sardinia itinerary from a two-week road trip: Cagliari, Su Nuraxi, Bosa, Alghero, La Maddalena and the Gulf of Orosei. Real 2025 prices, ferry times, the Cala Goloritze booking rules, and the one beach we did not get into.
Landing at Cagliari-Elmas and the Hire Car Queue
We landed at Cagliari-Elmas just after two in the afternoon and spent the next fifty minutes in a hire car queue that moved at the speed of a Sardinian summer. The car was the whole plan. Sardinia is roughly 24,000 square kilometres and the bus timetables are written for people who live there. We had booked a small diesel and were handed something smaller. That turned out to be lucky on the west coast, where the lanes narrow to one car and a wall. What nobody warned us about was the ZTL, the restricted traffic zone covering most of the old centre. We parked outside it and walked in. Two cars ahead of us did not.
Sunset From the Bastione di Saint Remy
The Bastione di Saint Remy is a white limestone terrace built onto the old walls of the Castello district, and it costs nothing to walk up. From the top you look down over the Marina and Stampace quarters, the port, and the long pale strip of Poetto beach off to the east. We got up there around eight in the evening. Half of Cagliari was already sitting on the parapet with beer from the kiosk below. The staircase up from Piazza Costituzione is steeper than it photographs, and we arrived out of breath in front of a group of teenagers who had cycled it.
Flamingos at Molentargius, Ten Minutes From the City Beach
Molentargius is a former salt works turned regional park, sitting in the gap between Cagliari and Poetto. Entry is free and it opens 8:30 to 20:00 from May to October. We walked in from the Via della Pineta entrance at half past eight, early enough that the light was still flat and the mosquitoes had not fully committed to the day. Greater flamingos are the reason to come. Cagliari holds one of the largest breeding populations in Europe and the birds stand in the shallow pans a few hundred metres from a suburban road, entirely unbothered. We had brought no binoculars. This became a theme.
The First Culurgiones, and They Were the Wrong Ones
We had read about culurgiones before the trip. Potato and pecorino dumplings closed with a hand-braided pleat called the spighittu, the ear-of-wheat stitch that reportedly takes years to learn. They hold a PGI as Culurgionis d'Ogliastra, which means the protected ones come from one province on the east coast. Cagliari is not it. We ordered them anyway, in a place off Via Sardegna, and they came in tomato sauce with pleats too even to have been made by hand. Perfectly fine. Completely forgettable. We spent the next fortnight ordering them again in every town we stopped in.
Su Nuraxi di Barumini: 15 Euros and a Tour Every Half Hour
An hour north of Cagliari, Su Nuraxi is the nuraghe on all the postcards: a Bronze Age central tower with four corner towers, and a whole collapsed village packed around its base. The combined ticket was 15 euros in 2025 and covers Su Nuraxi, the Casa Zapata museum complex and the Centro Giovanni Lilliu in the village. You cannot wander it alone. Guided tours leave every thirty minutes and run about an hour, in Italian, English or French, included in the price. We turned up four minutes before a departure, which is not enough. They ask for fifteen minutes and they mean it. We waited for the next one in the shade of the ticket office.
The Giants of Mont'e Prama in a Small Town Museum
The Giovanni Marongiu civic museum in Cabras is a modest building on an ordinary street, and it holds some of the oldest monumental statues in the Mediterranean. The Giants of Mont'e Prama are sandstone figures with concentric-ring eyes, dug out of a necropolis a few kilometres away. The museum shows six of them: three boxers, two archers and a warrior. Standard admission was 9 euros, with combined options that fold in Tharros and the Spanish tower. We gave it ninety minutes and came out unsettled. Nobody agrees on who carved them or why, and the labels are honest about that.
Tharros at Eleven in the Morning, Which Was a Mistake
Tharros sits on the tip of the Sinis peninsula. Phoenician foundation, Roman rebuild, abandoned around the eleventh century when the population moved inland and founded Oristano. Since August 2022 the site has been run by the Mont'e Prama Foundation. There is almost no shade on it. We arrived at eleven and did the columns and the Roman street grid in a slow shuffle between one patch of wall shadow and the next. On the walk back we went into San Giovanni di Sinis, one of the oldest churches on the island, mostly because it was cool inside, and stayed twenty minutes longer than the building warranted.
Bosa, the Malaspina Castle and a Glass of Malvasia at Four in the Afternoon
Bosa is stacked up a hillside above the river Temo in colours that look like someone ran out of paint and improvised. The Sa Costa quarter above the waterfront is stepped lanes with washing strung across them. The Castello Malaspina on the Serravalle hill was built by a Tuscan family in the second half of the thirteenth century, and entry runs around 5.50 euros. The walk up is worse than the castle. Bosa also produces Malvasia di Bosa, an amber dessert wine made here for centuries. We had a glass at four in the afternoon in direct sun, which was a decision, and then sat in a doorway for twenty minutes.
Forty-Five Kilometres of Cliff Road, and Not One Vulture
The road from Bosa to Alghero runs about 45 km along the SP105 and SP49, cliff after cliff with cork and holm oak on the inland slopes and not much of a guardrail on the seaward side. It gets used for car adverts. Driving it without stopping takes 1 to 1.5 hours. Everyone stops, so budget three or four. The reason to stop is Capo Marrargiu. The last two griffon vulture colonies in Sardinia are on this stretch of coast, and the birds carry a wingspan close to two and a half metres. We pulled over four times and stood there squinting at thermals. We saw two gulls and a brown thing that was probably a kestrel.
Street Signs in Catalan in Alghero
The street signs in Alghero are in two languages. The city was taken by the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century and repopulated from Catalonia, and the local variety, alguerès, is still spoken by a minority. That is why the old town has a carrer where the rest of Sardinia has a via, and why the tourist office hands out maps with both. We walked the sea walls at dusk with several hundred other people, ate more bread than dinner required, and ordered culurgiones for the second time. Better than Cagliari. Still not the ones we had read about.
654 Steps Down to the Grotta di Nettuno
The Grotta di Nettuno is a sea cave under the cliffs of Capo Caccia, and there are two ways in. A boat from Alghero, or the Escala del Cabirol, 654 steps cut into the cliff face and named after the roe deer. We took the steps. Going down is a pleasure. Coming back up is 654 steps in July. Tickets were listed around 14 euros full and 10 reduced, with combined options quoted as high as 18. A timed slot is compulsory even if you buy at a desk, and in high summer the Capo Caccia ticket office is shut, so buying on arrival is not possible. We booked online the night before and took the 10:00 entry.
Castelsardo, the Day the Weather Broke, and Pane Frattau
Castelsardo was founded in 1102 by the Doria family of Genoa. It is a cone of houses under a castle, jutting into the Gulf of Asinara, and it is known for basket weaving in dwarf palm, with a museum of it inside the castle walls. This was the day the weather turned. We had planned a beach afternoon and got flat grey sky and a wind that took an umbrella off a bar table two metres from where we sat. We ate pane frattau instead: sheets of pane carasau softened in broth, layered with tomato and grated pecorino, egg on top. It was invented as poor food. It was the best thing we ate in the first week.
The Fifteen-Minute Ferry From Palau
The crossing from Palau to La Maddalena takes 15 minutes and runs roughly every half hour, first boat around 08:15 and last around 19:45, all year. Foot passengers pay somewhere between 5.50 and 10.50 euros one way. With a car it starts near 15.90. Between June and September there are around 148 crossings a week, dropping to about 59 in winter. We took the car across and did not need to. La Maddalena town is walkable and there is an island bus. The one argument for it was Caprera, joined to La Maddalena by a causeway and a long way to walk in that heat.
Garibaldi's White Farmhouse on Caprera
Giuseppe Garibaldi bought half of Caprera in 1855 and died there in 1882. The Compendio Garibaldino is his house, kept close to how he left it, down to the wheelchair and the clocks. Adult admission was 8 euros, free for under-18s, and a cumulative ticket with the Garibaldi Memorial ran 12. It is an odd museum to walk through. A man who ran military campaigns across two continents spent his last twenty-seven years on a granite island planting vines and conducting arguments by post. The rooms are small and the ceilings are low and the whole thing takes under an hour.
The Beach We Did Not Get Into
This was the plan that came apart. Cala Coticcio on Caprera sits inside the La Maddalena national park, in a zone classed as needing high protection, and it is not freely accessible. You need a 3 euro park fee paid through the Italian pagoPA platform and a licensed guide, roughly 25 euros in cash handed over before you start walking. Park staff sit at the trailhead and check. We knew about the fee. We had not understood that the guide is compulsory and that slots go days in advance. We got as far as the start of the path, were turned around, and spent the afternoon swimming off rocks near the causeway instead. It was still a good afternoon.
Over the Supramonte on the SS125
The SS125 Orientale Sarda runs 354 km up the eastern length of the island. The 50 km between Dorgali and Baunei is the part people drive for its own sake. It climbs into the Supramonte through the passes of Genna Arramene, Genna Coggina and Genna Silana, reaching around 800 metres, on good tarmac with very little traffic on it. At Genna Silana there is a bar and a road-keeper's house that appears out of nothing after tens of kilometres of limestone and holm oak. We stopped for a coffee that was mediocre and a view that was not. This was the leg where the very small hire car finally made sense.
A Hundred and Fifty Murals in Orgosolo
Orgosolo is inland, in the Barbagia, and it carries roughly 150 murals on its walls, out of about 250 across Sardinia as a whole. The first went up in 1969, painted by an anarchist collective during protests against a military firing range at Pratobello. The turn came in 1975, when a middle school teacher from Siena, Francesco Del Casino, took his pupils out to paint a series on anti-fascist resistance. They are not decoration. Quotations of Picasso sit alongside Vietnam, Chile, land occupations and shepherds with rifles. Some are flaking off the render. Nobody charges anything to walk around and look at them.
Cala Gonone, and the Boat You Are Told Not to Book
You drop into Cala Gonone from Dorgali through a tunnel and a set of switchbacks that put you on the coast in about fifteen minutes. It is a small resort town pressed between the mountain and the Gulf of Orosei, and the reason to be there is the port. Boats leave from it for the beaches you cannot drive to. Fares run roughly 40 to 60 euros a head depending on the route, and several operators state plainly that you do not need to book, you just come to the port. We came to the port at 08:40 for a 09:00 departure and got the last two seats on the boat we wanted. Next time we would book.
Cala Luna and Cala Mariolu, by QR Code
The boat ran the coast past Cala Luna, Cala Sisine, Cala Biriola, Cala Mariolu, Cala dei Gabbiani and Cala Goloritze, landing at three of them with about an hour and a half ashore at each. The thing that has changed: since summer 2025 the Baunei coast beaches are capped. Landing requires a reservation and a QR code shown to staff on the sand, whether you arrive with an operator or in a boat you rented yourself. Ours handled it for the group. Cala Mariolu is white pebbles rather than sand, they are hot enough to hop across, and the water was colder than it looked. I got in twice and stayed in once.
Down Into Gorropu, and the Climb Nobody Mentions
Gola su Gorropu is a limestone canyon in the Supramonte, and the walk in from the Genna Silana pass is 8 km, roughly 1.5 to 2 hours going down. Entry to the gorge itself is 5 euros, paid at the bottom. It opens 10:30 to 17:00 with last admission around 16:00. Jeep shuttles run from the valley side for about 20 euros one way. The part that catches people is that down means several hundred metres of descent, and the return is the same climb in afternoon heat. Guidance says allow four hours minimum for the round trip. We took five and a half and ran out of water with two kilometres still to go.
The Golgo Plateau and a 270-Metre Hole in the Ground
From Baunei, eight kilometres of hairpins climb to the Golgo plateau at around 630 metres: a dark basalt lava flow sitting on white limestone, with pigs and donkeys wandering loose across it and a view running from the Gennargentu to the Gulf of Orosei. The thing to stop for is Su Sterru, the deepest single-span karst chasm in Europe at 270 metres. Old topographic maps labelled it an extinct crater and put it at 100 to 150. It was only settled in 1957, when a 22-year-old caver from Nuoro reached the bottom. There is a low wall and a rope, and an opening that does not read as 270 metres until you are standing at the edge of it.
Cala Goloritze, Booked Seventy-Two Hours in Advance
Cala Goloritze is the one with the limestone spire above it, and getting there is an administrative process. Booking is compulsory from April to October, the beach is capped at 250 people at any one time, it costs 7 euros a head, and slots only open 72 hours ahead. Trail access runs 07:30 to 14:00 and you have to be off the beach by late afternoon. Our first attempt sold out while the page was open in front of us. We got in three days later by sitting down at 07:05 to book the following morning. The path down from the Golgo plateau takes about 1 hour 30 on loose limestone and there is no other way in on foot. We started at 07:40 and had close to an hour with almost nobody there.
Culurgiones, Finally, in the Province That Makes Them
Ogliastra is where Culurgionis d'Ogliastra come from, and on the last night, in Tortoli, we finally ate them the way we had read about. No tomato. Butter, sage and grated pecorino. The filling was potato, mature pecorino, mint and garlic, in a durum wheat dough with no egg in it. The mint is the part nobody puts on the menu and the part that does the work. The pleats were uneven, which is how you could tell a hand had made them. We ordered a second plate and did not share it. Two weeks and something like 1,200 kilometres to eat a potato dumpling in the one province with the right to the name.
Back Down the SS125, and the Seadas We Should Have Ordered Sooner
The drive back down the SS125 to Cagliari took the better part of four hours with stops. We returned the car with a scuff on the near-side mirror, collected from a wall in Bosa that had been in that exact position for about seven hundred years. Last meal was seadas, which we should have been eating all fortnight. Pastry filled with fresh cheese and lemon, fried, then covered in honey. It started out as shepherds' food and it is salty and sweet at the same time, which no dessert I can think of manages. Next time: fewer towns, more days in Ogliastra, book the Cala Coticcio guide before leaving home, and binoculars. I still have not seen a griffon vulture.