Orosei

The pine woods you drive through today on the way to the sea were not there. They were planted at the beginning of the nineteen-fifties, stone pine along the whole coast and at the foot of Monte Tuttavista, to stop the advancing sand: not one of Orosei's pine woods is natural, and in their place there was low scrub. The river has been moved too. After 1968 the overflow canal let a dune grow over the original mouth of the Cedrino, which vanished from the map and came back only with the floods of 2005 and 2008; the ponds behind the dunes used to be separate, and in the nineteen-thirties they were connected to the sea by openings that turned their water brackish.

The paradox is that a town facing twenty kilometres of coast and crossed by a river has always had little to drink. Unlike its neighbours Galtellì and Irgoli, Orosei has few springs and poor ones: until at least after the Second World War people drew from wells, or straight from the river, and those who could built themselves a cistern. The historic centre is still the medieval one, and into the municipal territory have fallen villages that disappeared in the Middle Ages, such as Bibisse, which was also called Bitthé. The beach of Cala Liberotto, until 1799, was called Cala Curlo.