History of Alghero

Anghelu Ruju is the largest pre-nuragic necropolis in Sardinia: 38 domus de janas — “fairy houses” — carved underground, some with as many as eleven chambers, in use for well over a thousand years. It was found by accident in 1903 during building work on the Sella & Mosca estate and takes its name from the landowner, Angelo Ruju. The winery handed the site over to the state in 1977.

SourcesNecropoli di Anghelu Ruju — Wikipedia (it)Domus de Janas — UNESCO

The main tower went up in the 15th–14th century BC; a second tower and a village followed. Fewer than fifty huts survive, though archaeologists reckon on 150 to 200 when the place was alive. Its meeting hut still has the stone bench running round the wall and, at the centre, a sandstone model of a nuraghe. The village burned and was abandoned around the 8th century BC.

SourcesComplesso nuragico di Palmavera — SardegnaCulturaNuraghe Palmavera — SardegnaTurismo

The excavations there produced some of the oldest Phoenician and Greek pottery in the western Mediterranean, and a local hybrid: the “Sant'Imbenia amphora”, made on the spot between the 9th and 7th century BC and shipped as far as the Iberian peninsula. The bay was a natural harbour on the metal routes — silver, lead, copper, iron — which is why foreign traders settled in among the huts.

SourcesComplesso di Sant'Imbenia — SardegnaCulturaPhoenician and Punic Sardinia — Wikipedia (en)

The villa had some 49 rooms spread over roughly 140 metres: decorated halls, service quarters and a bath suite, put up between the end of the 1st century BC and the start of the 1st century AD. It was a place to rest rather than a working farm. Excavations between 1994 and 2005 recovered the wall and floor decoration of two of its rooms.

SourcesVilla romana di Sant'Imbenia — Alghero TurismoPorto Conte — Wikipedia (en)

In February 1353 the Sardinian branch of the Doria ceded Alghero to Genoa. On 27 August an Aragonese-Venetian fleet beat the Genoese in the bay of Porto Conte and the town opened its gates — but the garrison left behind was small, and the inhabitants took the place back. Peter IV of Aragon came in person the next summer; after a long siege Alghero surrendered on 9 November 1354.

SourcesBattaglia navale di Porto Conte — Wikipedia (it)1353, la battaglia navale di Porto Conte — Storie di Alghero

The crown advertised the move: money, amnesties for lesser crimes, exemption from customs duties, the right to sell up after five years. Resettlement ran until about 1372. It had a hard edge — Sardinians and Genoese could not own property inside the walls or trade there, and a privilege of 10 July 1478 barred Sardinians and Corsicans from living in the town at all. The language still spoken in these lanes is the result of that policy.

SourcesIl ripopolamento catalano di Alghero — Storie di AlgheroA. Mattone, Privilegi e istituzioni (PDF) — Università di Sassari

Corallium rubrum grows between 30 and 200 metres down, and Alghero sits above some of the richest beds in the Mediterranean. Fishing it probably goes back to antiquity, but under the Catalans it became the town's business, and the boom of the 1700s made the port a Mediterranean centre for the trade. A branch of coral went onto the town's arms; workshops in the old town still cut it by hand.

SourcesMuseo del Corallo — Musei di AlgheroRiviera del Corallo — Wikipedia (en)

Most of what stands today was built in the 16th century, when the danger came from Barbary raiders and rival fleets. The circuit ran right round the town, with towers at its angles — Sulis, Sant Jaume, Esperó Reial, Porta a Terra — and a landward gate shut at night. Alghero was a garrison as much as a port, and stayed one for three hundred years.

SourcesMura e bastioni di Alghero — SardegnaTurismoLe fortificazioni — Musei di Alghero

The handover came out of the treaties that wound up the War of the Spanish Succession. Turin brought Italian administration and Italian schooling, and Catalan slipped out of official life into kitchens and courtyards. Alghero kept its standing as a royal city with its own privileges, but the direction was set: over the following century the town became, on paper, Italian.

SourcesAlghero — Wikipedia (en)Città regie della Sardegna — Wikipedia (it)

On 29 November 1847 Charles Albert granted the “perfect fusion” that part of the island's own elite had asked for: Sardinia's parliament and its separate legal order were dissolved into the mainland Savoy states, under a single capital in Turin. Fourteen years later that state, enlarged by the wars of unification, was proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy on 17 March 1861. Alghero became Italian by this constitutional route — no conquest, no plebiscite, no date on which the town changed hands.

SourcesFusione perfetta del 1847 — Wikipedia (it)Regno di Sardegna (1847-1861) — Wikipedia (it)

The decree of 25 April 1867 ended the town's fortress status, though demolition had already started in the 1850s and 1860s. The entire landward circuit went, and the Torre di Porta Terra is all that survives of it. On the sea side the bastions were kept and planted with trees. The walk along the ramparts that visitors take today is the by-product of a military decision to stop defending the town.

SourcesTorre di Porta Terra — Comune di AlgheroLe fortificazioni — Musei di Alghero

The Nurra plain behind Alghero was malarial marsh; a Ferrara-based colonisation body took on 6,452 hectares of it in 1933 and Fertilia was inaugurated in 1936, laid out like the other new towns of the regime. The war cut the project short. From 1947 the half-finished village took in Italian exiles from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia — more than 500 arrived between 1948 and 1952 — and their surnames are still on the shopfronts.

SourcesFertilia — Storie di AlgheroFertilia, l'ultima spiaggia dei giuliano-dalmati — East Journal

From 1943 the raids came in earnest on the island's ports and air bases; Cagliari lost about three quarters of its built fabric. Alghero's night was 17 May 1943: around 22:50 the bombers aimed at the airfield outside town and hit the centre, killing more than 160 civilians, destroying over 500 houses and damaging some 2,000, the cathedral among them. The town still calls it la Nit de Sant Pasqual. After the armistice of 8 September the German division on Sardinia pulled north and shipped out to Corsica by 17 September, so no ground fighting followed — but Alghero was left with rubble and years without roofs.

Sources17 maggio 1943, la notte che distrusse Alghero — Alghero EcoAlghero ricorda i bombardamenti — La Nuova SardegnaStoria della Sardegna contemporanea — Wikipedia (it)

ERLAAS, funded by the Italian state, the Rockefeller Foundation and postwar aid, began spraying in April 1946. Sardinia counted 75,447 malaria cases that year and nine in 1951: the mosquito was never wiped out, but the disease was. What followed on this coast was hotels — and an airport at Fertilia that now handles the low-cost traffic of the whole north-west.

SourcesCinquant'anni senza malaria — Scienza in reteMalaria, DDT e americani in Sardegna — Informati Sardegna

Sardinian regional law came first, in 1997; the Italian law on historical linguistic minorities followed in 1999. Surveys put algherese at roughly 24% of residents as a mother tongue — fewer than a century ago, more than most minority languages manage. The plaques on the street corners carry both names, which is the shortest summary of the six thousand years above: what came here by sea, stayed.

SourcesAlghero — Wikipedia (en)Perché ad Alghero si parla catalano? — Geopop