Gairo

The old core of Gairo, which goes back to the thirteen hundreds, was half destroyed by a flood in 1951; but the ground had been moving since the end of the previous century, storm after storm, landslide after landslide. In the end the village was abandoned altogether. The people rebuilt a little higher up, and some went down to the coast — and what grew down there became, over the years, another village and then, in 1984, a comune of its own, Cardedu. Gairo Vecchio is still there, two kilometres to the south, empty, and it is one of the best known abandoned places in Sardinia: you can walk into it. The arms of the comune, granted that same year, are cut in two: above, Monte Perda Liana; below, the sea with the sun on the horizon.

The territory really does run from the Gennargentu to the sea. On Monte Armidda, at one thousand one hundred and fifty metres, there is an astronomical observatory, founded in 1989 by the amateur astronomers of Ogliastra with the help of the comune of Lanusei — and it has belonged to Gairo since 2017, when the court of appeal of Cagliari said so. Above the hamlet of Taquisara opens a cave with a little lake inside it whose level hardly ever changes, and there lives a Sardinian cave salamander which, when frightened, gives off a very strong smell together with a stinging liquid. And the carnival here, Su Maimulu, begins on 17 January with the bonfire of Sant'Antonio: the masks blacken their faces with the soot of that fire, and a man stands up in front of everybody to take the responsibility for the feast upon himself.