In the old town

Work began in 1530, after the diocese of Alghero-Bosa was created in 1503 and the town found itself without a cathedral. The base is Catalan Gothic, modelled on Santa Eulàlia in Barcelona; it was consecrated in 1593 while still unfinished, and the transept and its octagonal dome followed in 1638. The front you see from the square is much later — a Doric portico of 1820 and a neoclassical facade of 1862 — so the building reads as two centuries stacked on top of each other. The bell tower kept the Catalan idea: an octagonal shaft under a pyramid of polychrome majolica.

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The Franciscans arrived in the fourteenth century and the church was built in 1380, then rebuilt in Catalan Gothic during the fifteenth. Behind the sacristy is the cloister, on two levels: twenty-two sandstone columns below, from the sixteenth century, and an eighteenth-century gallery above. In summer it becomes a concert venue. Inside the church, on the fourth pillar on the left, stands the wooden Christ at the Column that is carried through the streets during Holy Week.

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The church took its present shape from a rebuilding begun in 1612 and was handed to the Jesuits, who ran a college beside it until the order was dissolved in 1774 and the buildings became a barracks. The dome is the thing everyone knows: octagonal, on a high drum, covered outside in polychrome tiles. Those tiles are not Baroque — they were designed around 1950 by Antoni Simon Mossa, the architect of the Escala del Cabirol at Neptune's Grotto, together with the painter Filippo Figari.

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The Misericordia belongs to the confraternity of the same name and is the working heart of the town's Holy Week, the rite Alghero has kept in the Catalan tradition since the end of the sixteenth century. It is a plain interior compared with the cathedral, which is rather the point: the building exists for one week of the year, when the Desclavament — the deposition from the cross — is staged inside it and the procession leaves from its door.

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This was the civic centre of Catalan Alghero, and it still carries its Catalan name, Plaça del Pou Vell — the square of the old well. Palazzo d'Albis, also known as Casa de Ferrera, stands on it: the building where, according to local tradition, Charles V stayed on 7–8 October 1541 on his way to Algiers and addressed the townspeople as "todos caballeros". Treat that as a story rather than a fact — the historian Giuseppe Manno described the visit at length and never mentioned it.

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Built in the fourteenth century with money from the town's Jewish community — which is why it is also called the Torre degli Ebrei — it was originally the Porta Reial, the main entrance from the Sassari road, closed at dusk and opened at dawn. When the fortress status ended by decree in 1867 and the landward walls came down, this tower was left standing alone. It now holds a tourist information point, and the square around it is where the Christmas market opens each November.

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MASA opened in the old town and gathers what has come out of the ground around Alghero: material from the nuragic village at Palmavera, from Sant'Imbenia in the bay of Porto Conte — where Phoenician and Greek pottery among the oldest in the western Mediterranean was found — and from the Roman villa on the same bay. It is the place to come before or after driving out to those sites, because the objects are here and the walls are there.

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Ferdinand the Catholic made Alghero the second fortress of Sardinia in the sixteenth century, with a full ring of walls and towers. The decree of 25 April 1867 ended that status; the landward walls were dismantled, but the seaward ones were kept and planted with trees. What is left is a raised terrace over the water, running from the Maddalena bastion round to Torre di Sulis, with cafés under the ramparts and the cathedral bell tower behind you.

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The Maddalena bastion closes the circuit at its northern corner, where the fortifications turn inland towards the port. It is the quieter end of the promenade — a long low wall, a few palms, and a view back along the whole seaward front of the town. A plaque on the tower records Garibaldi's stay in Alghero.

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Built in the first half of the sixteenth century, the tower has walls fully six metres thick over three floors, high vaults on heavy stone ribs and a spiral stair connecting the levels. Its first name was Torre dello Sperone — Torres de l'Esperó Reial — after the spur of fortification beside it. It became Torre di Sulis in the nineteenth century, after Vincenzo Sulis, the Cagliari tribune held here from 1799 until his pardon in 1820. Two cannon recovered from a Spanish galleon wrecked offshore around 1500 stand beside it.

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Part of the sixteenth-century reorganisation of the defences, the tower measures about ten metres across and nearly sixty in circumference, with walls 4.30 m thick. It had three floors reached by an internal stair; two survive, under a barrel vault carried on heavy ribs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. The ground floor was given a new door when the walls around it came down, and is used for exhibitions.

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The harbour runs north from the Maddalena bastion, and it still does two jobs at once: a fishing fleet on one side, a marina on the other. For four centuries this is where the coral boats landed their catch, the trade that gave the coast its name. Today it is also where the boats leave for Capo Caccia and Neptune's Grotto — the sea route that was the only way into the cave for about 150 years, until the Escala del Cabirol was cut into the cliff in 1954.

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The museum sits in Villa Costantino, built in 1927 and kept as it was — a house that is itself part of the exhibition. What it explains is why Alghero is the capital of the Riviera del Corallo: Corallium rubrum grows on these seabeds between 30 and 200 metres down, it was the town's main business from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, and a sprig of it sits in the municipal coat of arms. Workshops on the lanes of the old town still cut and set it.

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Built around 1880 on the ruins of an old watchtower, Villa Las Tronas was the summer residence of Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena until the 1940s, and has been a hotel since 1961. The name comes from two cylindrical rocks below it shaped like thrones. You cannot go in unless you are staying, but the headland is public: the walk out along Lungomare Valencia, past the two small coves the villa divides, is worth the twenty minutes from the bastions.

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