Things to Do in Sardinia Beyond the Beach: Cagliari, Nora and Barumini

Sardinia’s dramatic coastline is only part of the story — the island’s history runs far inland.

Sardinia’s coastline draws most of the attention, but the island’s real depth lies inland and in its cities. Cagliari’s hilltop citadel, the Roman ruins at Nora, and the Bronze Age towers of Barumini tell a longer, stranger story than any beach can — one that runs from Nuragic chieftains through Phoenician traders to Piedmontese kings. This guide covers the best things to do in Sardinia away from the shoreline, following the route Odyssey Traveller takes on its Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica small group tour for seniors.

Odyssey Traveller Small Group Tour

Discover Sardinia on the Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica Tour

Our 25-Day Tour spends a week exploring Sardinia in depth — from Cagliari’s museums to the fortified towers of Barumini — as part of a wider journey through four of the Mediterranean’s most historically rich islands.

• Guided tour of Cagliari’s National Archaeological Museum
• Nora, Sardinia’s best-preserved Roman city
• UNESCO-listed Su Nuraxi nuraghe at Barumini
• Small group of fellow travellers | Solo travellers welcome

25-Day Tour · Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica

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Cagliari: Sardinia’s Layered Capital

The Castello citadel above Cagliari, fortified in turn by the Pisans, the Spanish and the House of Savoy.

Cagliari sits on a low hill above its own harbour, and the city reads like a cross-section of Mediterranean history. The Castello district, the old walled quarter at the summit, was built by the Pisans in the 13th century and later fortified by the Spanish and the House of Savoy. Its bastions — the Bastione di Saint Remy chief among them — offer wide views over the Gulf of Cagliari and, on a clear day, out to the salt flats where flamingos gather.

The city’s real draw for a history-minded traveller is the National Archaeological Museum, which holds the island’s most important collection of Nuragic bronzes — small, extraordinarily detailed figurines of warriors, priests and boat-builders cast more than 2,500 years ago. Seeing these figures before visiting a nuraghe site in person changes how the ruins read; the towers stop being empty stone and start looking like the work of a specific, organised society. Beneath the museum, the Roman amphitheatre — carved directly into the rock in the 2nd century AD — is a reminder that Cagliari was already an established city long before the Pisans arrived.

Cagliari’s Roman amphitheatre, carved directly into the bedrock in the 2nd century AD.

Cagliari’s harbour has drawn traders since the Phoenicians founded a settlement here in the 8th century BC, and every subsequent power that controlled the western Mediterranean — Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Pisans, Aragonese, Savoyards — left something behind. The result is a city best explored on foot and without too fixed an itinerary: a walk from the harbourfront up through the Marina district to the Castello’s bastions passes Romanesque churches, Spanish-built towers and 19th-century Piedmontese administrative buildings within the space of a few streets. The Cathedral of Santa Maria, largely rebuilt in the Baroque period over a Pisan-Romanesque core, is worth the short detour for its pulpits alone, carved in the 12th century and later split and moved here from Pisa.

Nora: Sardinia’s Best-Preserved Roman City

A half-hour south of Cagliari, on a narrow peninsula near the town of Pula, Nora is generally regarded as Sardinia’s best-preserved Roman city. The site was originally Phoenician, then Carthaginian, before becoming a Roman municipium — and each layer of occupation is visible in the archaeology. Mosaic floors from Roman-era bathhouses sit close to Punic-period foundations, and a partly submerged section of the town, now underwater a short distance offshore, shows how much the coastline itself has shifted since antiquity.

The theatre at Nora, built into a gentle slope facing the sea, is small compared with grander Roman sites elsewhere in the Mediterranean, but the setting is difficult to beat — tiered stone seating looking straight out over open water. Walking the site takes a couple of unhurried hours, and there is little shade, so a morning visit in the warmer months is worth planning for.

What sets Nora apart from many Roman sites is how legible its earlier, pre-Roman layers remain. The Phoenicians who founded the settlement, likely in the 9th or 8th century BC, chose the site for the same reason the Romans later kept it: a sheltered double bay offering safe anchorage on a stretch of coast with few natural harbours. A stele found here bearing one of the earliest known Phoenician inscriptions in the western Mediterranean gave the region — Nora, then Sardinia — one of its earliest written names. Archaeologists continue to work the site each season, and it is not unusual to see an active excavation trench alongside the areas open to visitors.

Barumini and the Nuragic World

The corbelled central tower of Su Nuraxi, built from stacked basalt without mortar around 1800–1500 BCE.

Inland from Cagliari, in the rolling farmland near the town of Barumini, stands Su Nuraxi — the most complete of the roughly 7,000 nuraghi scattered across Sardinia. These fortified stone towers, built without mortar between around 1800 and 500 BCE, are unique to the island, and Su Nuraxi is their finest surviving example: a central tower over 18 metres high, ringed by four smaller towers, surrounded in turn by a village of some 200 circular stone houses. The site was rediscovered only in the 1950s, after centuries buried under farmland, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

Standing inside the central tower’s corbelled chambers gives a genuine sense of the engineering involved, achieved with no more than stacked stone and careful geometry. Odyssey Traveller has covered the archaeology of Su Nuraxi and the wider Nuragic civilisation in detail in a dedicated article — worth reading before or after a visit for anyone who wants the fuller story of who built these towers and why.

Nuoro and the Sardinian Interior

East of Barumini, the road climbs toward Nuoro, at the foot of Monte Ortobene, in a region the Sardinians call Barbagia. This is the least Italianised part of the island — mountainous, historically isolated, and the last part of Sardinia to come under any outside control. The writer Grazia Deledda, Italy’s only female Nobel laureate in literature, was born in Nuoro and drew heavily on the region’s folk traditions, pastoral life and blood feuds in her novels. On the way toward the coast near Nuoro, the megalithic Tomb of the Giants at S’Ena e Thomes offers a quieter, less-visited counterpart to Barumini — a Bronze Age communal burial monument set in open countryside, usually without another visitor in sight.

Sardinia’s interior is also where the island’s food culture is most distinct from mainland Italy: pane carasau (a thin, crisp flatbread historically carried by shepherds), roast suckling pig cooked over myrtle wood, and pecorino sardo made from the milk of sheep grazed on mountain pasture. It is worth building in time to eat at a local restaurant here rather than rushing straight through to the coast.

Alghero: Catalan Sardinia

Alghero’s harbour and watchtower, built during the town’s Catalan-Aragonese period.

On Sardinia’s northwest coast, Alghero stands apart from the rest of the island both architecturally and linguistically. Taken by the Crown of Aragon in the 14th century and resettled with Catalan colonists, the old town still speaks a dialect of Catalan alongside Italian, and its narrow streets, watchtowers and sea walls owe more to Barcelona than to Rome. The fortifications encircling the historic centre are largely intact, and a walk along the ramparts at sunset, with the Mediterranean on one side and the old town’s sandstone buildings on the other, is one of the more understated pleasures of a Sardinia itinerary.

Beyond the walls, the coastline north of Alghero holds Neptune’s Grotto, a limestone cave system reached either by boat or by descending the 654-step Escala del Cabirol cut into the cliff face. Most visitors take the boat one way, at minimum.

Alghero’s cuisine reflects its Catalan roots as clearly as its street names do. Lobster features far more prominently on menus here than elsewhere on the island, typically prepared simply — grilled or in a tomato-based sauce close to Catalan lobster stew — and paired with local Vermentino, Sardinia’s principal white wine grape. The Sunday market and the daily fish market near the port are worth a look even without buying anything, as a sense of how central the sea still is to the town’s working life, not just its tourist trade.

Planning Your Visit

These sites span a wide arc of the island, and Sardinia’s public transport between them can be slow and infrequent outside the main coastal towns, which makes independent travel between Cagliari, Barumini, Nuoro and Alghero more time-consuming than the distances alone suggest. A guided itinerary that has already worked out the logistics — where to stay, which sites pair well on the same day, when the archaeological museums are open — removes a good deal of the friction, particularly for travellers who would rather spend their energy at the sites themselves than on transport planning.

For a full day-by-day breakdown of how these stops fit together on the ground, our Sardinia itinerary for cultural travellers covers the route from Cagliari to Alghero in detail, and sits within our complete Mediterranean Islands travel guide covering Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica.

Sardinia rewards travellers who look past the coastline, and the sites above — a Roman city, a Bronze Age citadel, a Catalan-walled port and a mountain heartland virtually untouched by outside rule — make the case better than any beach could. Odyssey Traveller’s small group tour of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica builds a week around exactly this route, with expert local guides at each stop and the pace kept comfortable for mature and senior travellers, including those travelling solo.

Odyssey Traveller Small Group Tour

Visit Cagliari, Nora and Barumini with Odyssey Traveller

Join our 25-Day Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica tour and experience Sardinia’s Roman, Nuragic and Catalan heritage with expert local guides, in the company of like-minded travellers.

• Cagliari, Nora, Barumini, Nuoro and Alghero, all included
• Fully escorted with English-speaking local guides throughout
• Solo travellers welcome — no single supplement anxiety

25-Day Tour · Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica

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