Oniferi

At the edge of the main road, in an outcrop of trachyte, opens the necropolis of Sas Concas: it is the widest complex of domus de janas in Barbagia, where these tombs cut in the rock are usually found isolated or in small groups. It goes back to about 2700 before Christ and has tombs of complicated plan, with architectural and symbolic elements nobody can fully explain. On the walls of three of them — the tomb of the Hemicycle, tomb X and the New West — stylised men are engraved upside down, the capovolti, descending along the east wall; beside them is the figure of the Great Bear. On the opposite side there was another engraving, which they called the butterfly: it was stolen by persons unknown. Perhaps all together it meant the rebirth of life after death; perhaps it meant something else.

Three kilometres from the village stands the nuraghe Ola, a single tower preserved to ten metres and seventy, with a peculiarity visible at a glance: the first ten courses from the base are of great granite blocks, while the upper part is faced with well-worked ashlars of red trachyte. Inside, though, everything is granite: that trachyte served only to give colour, it was an ornament. From the entrance runs a paved corridor, then the stair — with the loopholes that lit it — and the central chamber with the tholos intact and three niches cut into the wall; around it stood the village of huts. The village, which in the middle ages belonged to Torres and then to Arborea, to the marquisate of Oristano from 1410 and to the Aragonese from 1478, lives today by shepherding and is one of the places where the canto a tenore, heritage of humanity, can still truly be heard.