Cardedu

This is one of the youngest comuni in Sardinia, and it exists because of a disaster. After the flood of 1951 a number of the inhabitants of Gairo had to abandon their houses and come down to the plain near the sea. In 1966, to meet the needs of the families who preferred to settle a little further up, the Borgo di Cardedu was founded, which at the beginning was made of four buildings only: the church, the elementary school, the carabinieri barracks and the offices of the Pelau-Buoncammino reclamation consortium. Around that first nucleus, still called la borgata, houses were built for the people who had come from Gairo, and Cardedu became one of its hamlets. Then, in 1984, it was erected into a comune of its own: that year is written in Roman numerals in the chief of the municipal coat of arms, as those do who were born recently and want it known. The name, in all probability, comes from the thistles the area was full of before anyone built on it.

Precisely because the village is new there are no buildings of historical importance, but the ground beneath is very old: there are the nuraghi of Perda e Pera, the domus de janas at Cucuddadas and above all an imposing nuragic sacred well called Su Presoneddu. It is still intact, and it is completely abandoned. The source says it without circumlocution: no local administration has ever considered it worth anything, and now it risks being ruined by the neglect of time and by vandals. In the parish church of San Paolo Apostolo, instead, there is a Way of the Cross donated by Maria Lai, the artist from Ulassai. The village lies on the Ogliastra coast, between Bari Sardo, Jerzu and Tertenia, and the language spoken there is the Campidanese Sardinian of the Ogliastra.