Baunei

Baunei has 3,716 inhabitants on a limestone ridge at four hundred and eighty metres, at the northern edge of the Ogliastra. The territory is vast — over two hundred square kilometres, almost all of it above four hundred metres — and is cut by the codule, narrow deep valleys that come down to the Tyrrhenian between cliffs and coves. From the sea rises like a spire the Pedra Longa, a limestone pinnacle; on the Golgo plateau opens instead Su Sterru, the deepest karst chasm in Europe.

The name perhaps comes from a word akin to the Greek bainos, the kiln where limestone was burnt to make lime; the first written record is from 1316, in a list of the villages of the Ogliastra. The territory holds more than a hundred Nuragic settlements and some twenty giants' tombs. The coast, almost entirely without roads, is walked along the Selvaggio Blu or reached by boat: cala Goloritzé, cala Sisine, cala Mariolu — which in Sardinian is called Ispuligidenie, snow fleas. Here nests the most populous Mediterranean colony of Eleonora's falcon.